Questlove
Questlove
Ahmir Khalib Thompson, known professionally as ?uestlove or Questlove, is an American percussionist, multi-instrumentalist, DJ, music journalist, record producer, and occasional actor. He is best known as the drummer and joint frontmanfor the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots. The Roots have been serving as the in-house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon since February 14, 2014 and is the same role he and the band served during the entire 969-episode run of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth20 January 1971
CountryUnited States of America
My theory is that nine times out of ten, if there's a depression, more a social depression than anything, it brings out the best art in black people. The best example is, Reagan and Bush gave us the best years of hiphop.
It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing.
It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."
Working with the artist elite can be like banging your head against the wall.
In the 2000s, I became an artist. I started preserving and educating. I became more obsessed with making iPod playlists for people.
Hip-hop is such a disposable art form from a business standpoint. It never treats its artists as art; it never treats its product as art.
Kurt Cobain represents a very legit, realistic outlook. Before that, in my head, to be a white artist was to be privileged.
I hate videos. I'm meticulous on everything from cover art, fonts, productions, mixing. But when it comes to videos, I just feel so defeated.
I feel like the downfall of any person is the second an artist starts celebrating their work themselves, that becomes problematic. And you know, I don't sit there, I don't bask in the awards I've won, you know, read my bank statements, I refuse. To me, that's how you start losing the hunger. So for me personally, I just don't celebrate it. I'm happy, right now.
Resistance here doesn't mean revolution. It doesn't mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it's that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.
I want the 'Roots' biopic to be animated - I see Charles Schulz drawing us. I think it would be more hilarious with the voices of children.
You know the greatest thing about working on 'Fallon?' I get so many anonymous gifts.
I would love to have some sort of 'Back To The Future' Delorean time machine travel device so I could go back to 1981 to see that very first Jackson 5 concert I went to, back when I was a kid.
I do secret stand-up shows around New York. I announce and tweet this to nobody - I get onstage and I do a quick five minutes.