Polymath bandleader Ahmir 'Questlove' Thompson chronicles his life in beats.
Mo'Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson, Grand Central Publishing, 282 pages
EnlargeBy?Robert Christgau for Barnes and Noble Review?
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Ahmir Thompson's?emergence as a major celebrity is the kind of anomaly that seemed beyond the reach of popular music in the 21st century. Not because he's a hip-hopper: Jay-Z, Kanye West, Lil Wayne, and many lesser others are boldface names.
But they're all rappers, natch, and even the brightest of them isn't as damn verbal, or as damn humane, as Questlove, who's only a damn drummer. Which is also an anomaly ? groups are rare in hip-hop these days, bands like Questlove's Roots unheard of, Questlove himself the first major drummer to emerge from the music since Sugarhill's Keith LeBlanc and arguably the best working anywhere.
And for his band to somehow become the house band of "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon"?is very nearly miraculous. Questlove's range and acuteness are so integral to the show that many believe they're why Fallon is about to displace Jay Leno and turn a hip-hopper into the thinking man's Paul Shaffer.
As is clear from Mo'Meta Blues, Questlove isn't precisely an intellectual. Although he attended private school for a while, his family wasn't middle-class enough to afford college, and if they had been it would have been Juilliard.
But where all musicians know music better than the vast majority of their fans and many are fairly encyclopedic about it, Questlove is a musical polymath of monumental obsessiveness ? a polymath who needs a warehouse for his record collection, a polymath who once sent out a drum greeting to D'Angelo by quoting "a Prince lick that wasn't in the song we were playing, but that was in my head while I was thinking about the song we were playing," a polymath who points out that the Milli Vanilli song he chose for Ashlee Simpson's Fallon walk-on was the VH-1 version. (Really now ? hadn't you always wondered about that?)
This guy thinks so much about music he's devoured reviews since he was eight. As a kid he made a mind game of predicting "Rolling Stone" grades in advance, complete with supporting rationale.
As is also clear from "Mo' Meta Blues," this phenomenally intelligent 42-year-old is in most things an autodidact, the exception being one you wouldn't figure from a be-Afroed galoot who prefers hoodies and T-shirts to the suits he wears on TV. To wit: Questlove is a showbiz kid.
His father was a doowop stalwart who, after his boutique went under in the late '60s, built a family nightclub act on the nascent oldies circuit. Financially, it was a living, nothing more. But in addition to preparing Questlove for the trying life of a touring musician ? pre-Fallon, the Roots were getting up to 200 gigs a year ? growing up on the road broadened young Ahmir in a way unknown to the kids in his West Philly hood or even at CAPA, the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, a monument to public education that just in Ahmir's time generated the seminal Boyz II Men and jazz standard-bearers Christian McBride, Kurt Rosenwinkel, and Joey DeFrancesco. I
t was at CAPA that nerdy Ahmir met streetwise Tariq Trotter, who as lead rapper Black Thought has been Questlove's partner in the Roots since before Tariq bestowed that name on them.
In a world where there are many more rock memoirs than anyone dare read, my own perusing, skimming, and gossiping indicate that three stand out as literature: Bob Dylan's, Patti Smith's, and Richard Hell's. But several hip-hop entries are strikingly competitive ? formally adventurous, multi-vocal. Aided by Ghostwritah Chris Norris, the RZA's 2005 "The Wu-Tang Manual" begins with solid character sketches of the nine original Wu-Tang Clan members and devotes 50 pages to close readings of various Wu gods' lyrics. With who knows how much advice from Dream Hampton, Jay-Z's 2010 "Decoded" toggles back and forth chronologically and drops key info and insight in footnote-sized glosses on the many lyrics it "decodes."
Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/xBvuZASVHHk/Mo-Meta-Blues
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