QuestLove is a man of many talents. As The Roots' drummer and a professor at New York University, he is also recognized as a scholar on all-music-everything.
Now, the Philly native has scribed a series of six essays that focus on "hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future" on Vulture.
In this week's essay, Quest conquers the topic, "When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America", contemplating through ink how Black music's mainstream reach feels like a strange victory.
"Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible," he writes. "Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant."
Read his piece here.
When the People Cheer: How Hip-Hop Failed Black America
By Questlove
This is the first in a weekly series of six essays looking at hip-hop's recent past, thinking about its distant past, and wondering about the possibility of a future.
There are three famous quotes that haunt me and guide me though my days. The first is from John Bradford, the 16th-century English reformer. In prison for inciting a mob, Bradford saw a parade of prisoners on their way to being executed and said, “There but for the grace of God go I.” (Actually, he said “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford,” but the switch to the pronoun makes it work for the rest of us.) The second comes from Albert Einstein, who disparagingly referred to quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance.” And for the third, I go to Ice Cube, the chief lyricist of N.W.A., who delivered this manifesto in “Gangsta Gangsta” back in 1988: “Life ain’t nothing but bitches and money.
Those three ideas may seem distant from one another, but if you set them up and draw lines between them, that’s triangulation. Bradford’s idea, of course, is about providence, about luck and gratitude: You only have your life because you don’t have someone else’s. At the simplest level, I think about that often. I could be where others are, and by extension, they could be where I am. You don’t want to be insensible to that. You don’t want to be an ingrate. (By the by, Bradford’s quote has come to be used to celebrate good fortune — when people say it, they’re comforting themselves with the fact that things could be worse — but in fact, his own good fortune lasted only a few years before he was burned at the stake.)
Einstein was talking about physics, of course, but to me, he’s talking about something closer to home — the way that other people affect you, the way that your life is entangled in theirs whether or not there’s a clear line of connection. Just because something is happening to a street kid in Seattle or a small-time outlaw in Pittsburgh doesn’t mean that it’s not also happening, in some sense, to you. Human civilization is founded on a social contract, but all too often that gets reduced to a kind of charity: Help those who are less fortunate, think of those who are different. But there’s a subtler form of contract, which is the connection between us all.
And then there’s Ice Cube, who seems to be talking about life’s basic appetites — what’s under the lid of the id — but is in fact proposing a world where that social contract is destroyed, where everyone aspires to improve themselves and only themselves, thoughts of others be damned. What kind of world does that create?
Those three ideas, Bradford’s and Einstein’s and Cube’s, define the three sides of a triangle, and I’m standing in it with pieces of each man: Bradford’s rueful contemplation, Einstein’s hair, Ice Cube’s desires. Can the three roads meet without being trivial? This essay, and the ones that follow it, will attempt to find out. I’m going to do things a little differently, with some madness in my method. I may not refer back to these three thinkers and these three thoughts, but they’re always there, hovering, as I think through what a generation of hip-hop has wrought. And I’m not going to handle the argument in a straight line. But don’t wonder too much when it wanders. I’ll get back on track.
*
I want to start with a statement: Hip-hop has taken over black music. At some level, this is a complex argument, with many outer rings, but it has a simple, indisputable core. Look at the music charts, or think of as many pop artists as you can, and see how many of the black ones aren’t part of hip-hop. There aren’t many hip-hop performers at the top of the charts lately: You have perennial winners like Jay Z, Kanye West, and Drake, along with newcomers like Kendrick Lamar, and that’s about it. Among women, it’s a little bit more complicated, but only a little bit. The two biggest stars, Beyoncé and Rihanna, are considered pop (or is that pop-soul), but what does that mean anymore? In their case, it means that they’re offering a variation on hip-hop that’s reinforced by their associations with the genre’s biggest stars: Beyoncé with Jay Z, of course, and Rihanna with everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to Eminem.
It wasn’t always that way. Back in the late '80s, when I graduated high school, you could count the number of black musical artists that weren’t in hip-hop on two hands — maybe. You had folksingers like Tracy Chapman, rock bands like Living Colour, pop acts like Lionel Richie, many kinds of soul singers — and that doesn’t even contend with megastars like Michael Jackson and Prince, who thwarted any easy categorization. Hip-hop was plenty present — in 1989 alone, you had De La Soul and the Geto Boys and EPMD and Boogie Down Productions and Ice-T and Queen Latifah — but it was just a piece of the pie. In the time since, hip-hop has made like the Exxon Valdez (another 1989 release): It spilled and spread.
So what if hip-hop, which was once a form of upstart black-folk music, came to dominate the modern world? Isn’t that a good thing? It seems strange for an artist working in the genre to be complaining, and maybe I’m not exactly complaining. Maybe I’m taking a measure of my good fortune. Maybe. Or maybe it’s a little more complicated than that. Maybe domination isn’t quite a victory. Maybe everpresence isn’t quite a virtue.
Twenty years ago, when my father first heard about my hip-hop career, he was skeptical. He didn't know where it was all headed. In his mind, a drummer had a real job, like working as music director for Anita Baker. But if I’m going to marvel at the way that hip-hop overcame his skepticism and became synonymous with our broader black American culture, I’m going to have to be clear with myself that marvel is probably the wrong word. Black culture, which has a long tradition of struggling against (and at the same time, working in close collaboration with) the dominant white culture, has rounded the corner of the 21st century with what looks in one sense like an unequivocal victory. Young America now embraces hip-hop as the signal pop-music genre of its time. So why does that victory feel strange: not exactly hollow, but a little haunted?
I have wondered about this for years, and worried about it for just as many years. It’s kept me up at night or kept me distracted during the day. And after looking far and wide, I keep coming back to the same answer, which is this: The reason is simple. The reason is plain. Once hip-hop culture is ubiquitous, it is also invisible. Once it’s everywhere, it is nowhere. What once offered resistance to mainstream culture (it was part of the larger tapestry, spooky-action style, but it pulled at the fabric) is now an integral part of the sullen dominant. Not to mention the obvious backlash conspiracy paranoia: Once all of black music is associated with hip-hop, then Those Who Wish to Squelch need only squelch one genre to effectively silence an entire cultural movement.
And that’s what it’s become: an entire cultural movement, packed into one hyphenated adjective. These days, nearly anything fashioned or put forth by black people gets referred to as “hip-hop,” even when the description is a poor or pointless fit. “Hip-hop fashion” makes a little sense, but even that is confusing: Does it refer to fashions popularized by hip-hop musicians, like my Lego heart pin, or to fashions that participate in the same vague cool that defines hip-hop music? Others make a whole lot of nonsense: “Hip-hop food”? “Hip-hop politics”? “Hip-hop intellectual”? And there’s even “hip-hop architecture.” What the hell is that? A house you build with a Hammer?
This doesn’t happen with other genres. There’s no folk-music food or New Wave fashion, once you get past food for thought and skinny ties. There’s no junkanoo architecture. The closest thing to a musical style that does double-duty as an overarching aesthetic is punk, and that doesn’t have the same strict racial coding. On the one hand, you can point to this as proof of hip-hop’s success. The concept travels. But where has it traveled? The danger is that it has drifted into oblivion. The music originally evolved to paint portraits of real people and handle real problems at close range — social contract, anyone? — but these days, hip-hop mainly rearranges symbolic freight on the black starliner. Containers on the container ship are taken from here to there — and never mind the fact that they may be empty containers. Keep on pushin’ and all that, but what are you pushing against? As it has become the field rather than the object, hip-hop has lost some of its pertinent sting. And then there’s the question of where hip-hop has arrived commercially, or how fast it’s departing. The music industry in general is sliding, and hip-hop is sliding maybe faster than that. The largest earners earn large, but not at the rate they once did. And everyone beneath that upper level is fading fast.
The other day, we ran into an old man who is also an old fan. He loves the Roots and what we do. Someone mentioned the changing nature of the pop-culture game, and it made him nostalgic for the soul music of his youth. “It’ll be back,” he said. “Things go in cycles.” But do they? If you really track the ways that music has changed over the past 200 years, the only thing that goes in cycles is old men talking about how things go in cycles. History is more interested in getting its nut off. There are patterns, of course, boom and bust and ways in which certain resources are exhausted. There are foundational truths that are stitched into the human DNA. But the art forms used to express those truths change without recurring. They go away and don’t come back. When hip-hop doesn’t occupy an interesting place on the pop-culture terrain, when it is much of the terrain and loses interest even in itself, then what?
Back to John Bradford for a moment: I’m lucky to be here. That goes without saying, but I’ll say it. Still, as the Roots round into our third decade, we shoulder a strange burden, which is that people expect us to be both meaningful and popular. We expect that. But those things don’t necessarily work together, especially in the hip-hop world of today. The winners, the top dogs, make art mostly about their own victories and the victory of their genre, but that triumphalist pose leaves little room for anything else. Meaninglessness takes hold because meaninglessness is addictive. People who want to challenge this theory point to Kendrick Lamar, and the way that his music, at least so far, has some sense of the social contract, some sense of character. But is he just the exception that proves the rule? Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling.
Jim Marshall, one of rock & roll's greatest photographers, was at counter-culture ground zero in San Francisco in the mid-to-late Sixties. This gorgeous oversized book documents the era through iconic images — the Beatles at Candlestick Park in '66, the Grateful Dead at a mobbed street fair in '68, Hendrix torching his guitar at Monterey Pop. Just as illuminating are verité shots of street life, hippies and straights rubbing wary shoulders as the Age of Aquarius, for a magic moment, dawned over them all. By Will Hermes
9'Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars' by Neil Young
Neil Young is a man of obsessions. Over the years he's fixated on everything from toy trains to digital audio quality, but the one constant has been classic automobiles — which meant many fans groaned when they learned his new book would focus on the many cars he's owned over the years. Thankfully, their fears were unfounded. The car angle is merely a clever framing device for Young to tell his life story in a more linear fashion than his scattershot 2013 memoir Waging Heavy Peace. Along the way we learn about the making of After The Goldrush ("I had just purchased a pound of Panama Red"), his regrets over his mistreatment of the members of Crazy Horse and Buffalo Springfield ("I was mostly juvenile and had no patience") and a crazy morning last year when his electric car LinkVolt broke down in Manhattan on his way to film a bit with Bill O'Reilly and Stephen Colbert, almost stalling out in the Lincoln Tunnel ("It was not a good day for us"). People wanting a straight account of Young's life will still be better served by reading Jimmy McDonough's definitive biography Shakey, but Special Deluxe is an enjoyable trip into the singer's endlessly fascinating mind. By Andy Greene
8 'Brothas Be, Yo Like George, Ain't That Funkin' Kinda Hard on You?: A Memoir,' by George Clinton with Ben Greenman
As funk's bravest cosmonaut, George Clinton spent the acid-fried Seventies in a world of Doo Doo Chasers and Thumpasorus Peoples and Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadooloops. But his look back on the methods to his madness are as clear-headed as a textbook, reading less like a gauntlet of antics (and there are antics — including a donkey taking a "regal shit" on the steps of London's Albert Memorial) and more like a great piece of rock criticism with himself at the center. He's a fan first, with omnivorous taste, and can break down theories with zeal, whether its meetings with fellow boundary pushers ("Listening to Sly Stone was like taking a master class in brilliant nonsense") or talking about how keyboardist Bernie Worrell used Bach-esque counterpoint. By Christopher R. Weingarten
7 'Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys.,' by Viv Albertine
If Viv Albertine's memoir had only focused on the broadest outlines of her life — her six years as the guitarist in influential post-punk band the Slits, her return after a decades-long absence — this would have been fascinating enough. But Albertine's approach is far closer, pushing past candor into the uncomfortably honest. Some of this memoir involves talk of romantic liaisons in the heady days of London's late-Seventies punk scene, but there's also a harrowing account of her struggle with cancer and grapplings with suburban isolation decades later. A fully realized portrait of its author. By Tobias Carroll
6 'Songs Only You Know: A Memoir,' by Sean Madigan Hoen
"My bandmates saw me at my most inspired, screaming every pain I had access to," Sean Madigan Hoen writes in his gritty, gripping punk-rock memoir, "though I had told them next to nothing of where I'd come from." Hoen, it turns out, had plenty to scream about — a father addicted to crack, a sister consumed by depression, his own feelings of alienation, helplessness, adolescent angst; if his former band, Detroit art-core self-immolators Thoughts of Ionesco, was his young-adult self's cathartic outlet, Songs Only You Know is his older, wiser reevaluation, no less vein-bulgingly visceral but infinitely more nuanced and poetic. It's funny at times, always brutally honest; a half-healed bruise, tender and multi-colored. Few books convey the fever-pitch intensity of youth with such vividness and so little glamorization, or as deeply explore the heartbreaking complexity of family — both those we're born into and the ones we choose. By Brandon Geist
5 'Dancing With Myself' by Billy Idol
In his self-penned memoir, Billy Idol fleshes out his charmed life with an even mix of thrilling tales of sex, drugs and rock & roll. The singer is refreshingly candid about his heavy heroin addiction in the Eighties, a regrettable Rolling Stone cover story interview when he got too drunk and yelled at the writer, an unrequited threesome that landed him in court on sexual deviancy charges and the harrowing motorcycle accident that stymied his acting career (he says he'd tried out for the T-1000 in Terminator 2 but lost the role due to a limp). He also recounts some of the weird stories behind some of his greatest hits — "Dancing With Myself" was inspired by a Tokyo disco where people stared at themselves in mirrors and "Rebel Yell" was named after a whiskey he drank once with the Rolling Stones. He also writes about his post-drugs fallout in such a heartfelt way that he almost makes a case for reconsidering Cyberpunk. By Kory Grow
4 'Glow: The Autobiography of Rick James,' by Rick James with David Ritz
Those looking simply for stories of sexual and pharmaceutical excess can re-read Mötley Crüe's The Dirt. In Glow, Rick James' posthumously published autobiography with author David Ritz, the funk pioneer surprisingly eschews repetitive freaky tales for a deeper look at an insane life. Sure, there are unflinching looks at the singer's crack binges and violent behavior — an already unbridled id made worse by the death of James' mother — but it's the lesser-known adventures that make this essential reading for those only familiar with James' dark side. A mob-connected dancer mom who smuggled James into the club as a child to see Miles Davis; a chance encounter with future members of the Band, who saved a teenage James from getting his ass kicked; a headache that prevented the musician from hanging out with people who would be murdered by the Manson Family that night. Any hack can make a lost weekend enthralling, James and Ritz can make the history of "Super Freak"'s four-note descending bass line as intriguing as a pipe-filled motel-room breakdown. By Jason Newman
3 'Respect: The Life of Aretha Franklin,' by David Ritz
Back in 1999, David Ritz helped Aretha Franklin write her memoirs, sanitized enough to be allowed into an operating room. This year, he issued Respect, his uncensored 520-page biography of the Queen of Soul, and it's clearly the book he's been preparing to write his whole life. It's stuffed full with revealing interviews from Franklin's family, her musical collaborators and subjects of Ritz's other books, from Smokey Robinson to B.B. King. MVP interview: the saucy Etta James. ("Who wants to admit that you're praising the Lord at the 8 p.m. service and servicing some drop-dead gorgeous hunk of a singer an hour later?") Knowing the details of Franklin's complicated, sometimes painful life — starting with the two sons she had at ages 12 and 14 — helps deepen an appreciation of the pain and passion that fueled her music. By Gavin Edwards
2'Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story,' By Rick Bragg
"He did not need a song to make him inappropriate. Jerry Lee Lewis had always been inappropriate, and being a little bit famous did not change it; you can paint a barn white a thousand times, but that won't make it a house." In this gripping biography, Pulitzer winner Rick Bragg tells the story of rock legend Jerry Lee Lewis with the full force of history, poetry and two years of exclusive interviews with the Killer himself. Bragg grounds his story in the texture and tradition of the South, but when he tells the epic tale of the creation of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," he captures Lewis's divine madness. Reading the saga of rock's piano pioneer, you will likely agree: "It was like any life, really, but with the dull parts taken out." G.E.
1 'The History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs,' by Greil Marcus
Greil Marcus carved his stern visage into rock criticism's Mount Rushmore decades ago, but he won't rest on his laurels — and he won't let rock & roll either. And so he kicks off this ferociously cerebral and warmly empathetic super-listicle with a monster sentence that reels off lots of critically acclaimed musicians — it takes, like, five pages — and by the time you've gotten from the beginning (Chuck Berry) to the end (Jay Z), his intent is clear: Forget all of this. Rest assured the 10 songs he picks from there will surprise, and/or amuse, and/or enrage and undoubtedly challenge you: They span from Joy Division (as filtered through that goofy Ian Curtis biopic) to Phil Spector (as filtered through Amy Winehouse) to Etta James (as insufficiently filtered through Beyoncé) and beyond. Whether he's talking Buddy Holly or Cyndi Lauper, Robert Johnson or the Flamin' Groovies, Marcus writes with a philosopher's zeal and a superfan's joy, drawing connections between artists and eras and solar systems you'd never even imagined. It's revisionist history of the best and most necessary kind. By Rob Harvilla
