WEBVTT - Introducing: Hip-Hop is History by Questlove 0:00:00.680 --> 0:00:04.880 Good people, good people, good people. What's up? This is Questlove? Yes, Questlove. 0:00:04.960 --> 0:00:07.000 I hope you heard of me. I'm excited to tell 0:00:07.040 --> 0:00:09.760 you about my brand new book. I'm still writing books. 0:00:09.920 --> 0:00:12.720 It's called hip Hop Is History. Hip Hop Is History, 0:00:13.080 --> 0:00:17.000 released on my own imprint, oh Books, That's right, au 0:00:17.239 --> 0:00:21.919 Wa Books. When hip hop first emerged in the seventies, 0:00:22.640 --> 0:00:26.279 I really wasn't expected to become the cultural force that 0:00:26.360 --> 0:00:29.960 it was. Many people dismissed it as a fad. However, 0:00:30.120 --> 0:00:32.559 as a young kid growing up in Philadelphia, it was 0:00:32.680 --> 0:00:35.000 everything to me. Like I would stay up late at 0:00:35.080 --> 0:00:39.360 night with my radio recording everything, studying it, and I 0:00:39.479 --> 0:00:41.440 saved my money to buy the vinyl the next day 0:00:41.440 --> 0:00:45.400 as soon as it landed, even made my songs. You 0:00:45.440 --> 0:00:49.080 know hey. Six decades later, here I am now as 0:00:49.120 --> 0:00:52.160 an award winning musician and filmmaker, a New York Times 0:00:52.159 --> 0:00:57.720 bestselling author, a producer, culinary entrepreneur, co founder of a 0:00:57.720 --> 0:01:01.040 little band called The Roots, and other things in between. 0:01:01.080 --> 0:01:04.280 But in everything I do, I try to promote the 0:01:04.440 --> 0:01:08.120 history of this culture and music. And I'm really proud 0:01:08.160 --> 0:01:10.720 to present to you hip Hop's history. And this book 0:01:10.760 --> 0:01:13.760 explores the last fifty years of the creative and cultural 0:01:13.800 --> 0:01:16.880 forces that made in shape hip hop, highlighting both the 0:01:16.920 --> 0:01:21.960 forgotten and the influential gems that build this culture altogether. Basically, 0:01:22.000 --> 0:01:24.920 here's a quickie preview of my new book, hip Hop 0:01:25.120 --> 0:01:44.600 Is History. McMillan the audio presents hip Hop Is History 0:01:45.680 --> 0:01:56.040 by Questlove with Ben Greener. This, of course is Questlove Introduction. 0:01:58.800 --> 0:02:01.600 I'm writing from the summer of twenty twenty three, the 0:02:01.720 --> 0:02:05.360 year that has been officially designated as the fiftieth anniversary 0:02:05.400 --> 0:02:09.640 of hip hop. The designation stends from the date mythic 0:02:09.960 --> 0:02:13.600 but also real, of a August eleventh, nineteen seventy three 0:02:13.760 --> 0:02:16.480 back to school party in the Bronx, held in the 0:02:16.480 --> 0:02:20.240 wreck room of an apartment building at fifteen twenty Sedgwick Avenue, 0:02:20.639 --> 0:02:23.960 planned by a Jamaican born team named Cindy Campbell. She 0:02:24.120 --> 0:02:27.400 made the decorations and made up a pricing structure a 0:02:27.480 --> 0:02:30.840 quarter for girls for admission, fifty cent for boys, and 0:02:30.919 --> 0:02:34.600 concessions that included seventy five cent hot dogs and featuring 0:02:34.639 --> 0:02:39.240 Cindy's older brother, Clive, nicknamed Cool Herk as a result 0:02:39.480 --> 0:02:43.440 of his imposing physical stature. Herk was short for Hercules 0:02:44.120 --> 0:02:47.320 Furnishing entertainment that consisted of a DJ set in which 0:02:47.320 --> 0:02:51.279 he spum funk records using a novel technique that foregrounded 0:02:51.280 --> 0:02:55.440 the beats or break beats, isolating them and repeating them 0:02:55.440 --> 0:02:58.160 in ways that not only provided a new space for 0:02:58.280 --> 0:03:02.920 dancers or breakdancing, but also constructed a frame over which 0:03:03.000 --> 0:03:07.840 hurt construtch, extended wraps or commentaries. I have my quibbles 0:03:07.840 --> 0:03:10.800 for picking this state as a birth date, for reasons 0:03:10.840 --> 0:03:14.000 I will explain. But no one can question the fact 0:03:14.120 --> 0:03:17.480 of hip hop's birth because no one can question what 0:03:17.600 --> 0:03:25.040 followed decades of innovation, achievement, energy, artistry, and history, meaning 0:03:25.400 --> 0:03:30.760 decades of life. History is never simple. It's layers upon layers. 0:03:31.320 --> 0:03:35.160 But what exactly is this miraculous mercurial genre that has 0:03:35.240 --> 0:03:38.480 given so much to me and so many other artists, 0:03:38.760 --> 0:03:41.240 and to which we are trying in turn to give 0:03:41.320 --> 0:03:48.840 something back. Big question, long answer to follow. The story 0:03:48.880 --> 0:03:53.000 begins just after Thanksgiving of twenty twenty two. Leftover turkey 0:03:53.040 --> 0:03:56.680 is still the refrigerator. My manager, Sean Gee and the 0:03:56.720 --> 0:04:00.720 television producers Jesse Collins and Dion harm And came to me. 0:04:01.360 --> 0:04:04.160 They had a question, The Grammys want to do something 0:04:04.160 --> 0:04:07.440 for Hip Hop fifty Would you lead it? How do 0:04:07.480 --> 0:04:10.840 you feel about putting something together? I'm the king of 0:04:10.920 --> 0:04:14.920 yes and the victim of it too. Out of muscle 0:04:14.960 --> 0:04:18.360 memory and habit, I agreed to a job before I 0:04:18.440 --> 0:04:22.120 think about what it actually involves, what I'm getting myself into, 0:04:22.680 --> 0:04:25.040 and what I might need to get myself out of. 0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:30.120 Of course, I said, no problem, whatsoever. I could do 0:04:30.160 --> 0:04:34.560 this in my sleep. But sleep was exactly what didn't happen. 0:04:35.200 --> 0:04:37.239 I got right to work trying to tell the story 0:04:37.240 --> 0:04:41.960 of the genre. First by building playlists and sourcing history. 0:04:42.520 --> 0:04:46.279 I knew I would need headliners, big artists, and I 0:04:46.279 --> 0:04:49.279 would also need important artists who might not have sould 0:04:49.320 --> 0:04:52.080 quite as much, not to mention artists of the moment. 0:04:52.760 --> 0:04:58.440 That meant Jay Z Snoop Dogg, Public Enemy, Drake, Griselda, Cardi, 0:04:58.520 --> 0:05:03.880 b Coila, Ray Coast, Contra, Jack Harlowe, Meek Mill, and 0:05:03.960 --> 0:05:07.880 all points in between. About five hours into the sourcing, 0:05:08.200 --> 0:05:12.520 it felt daunting, but with a window of possibility. About 0:05:12.560 --> 0:05:15.760 ten hours into the sourcing, I realized that the segment, 0:05:16.240 --> 0:05:18.960 whatever ended up being, had to have a time limit, 0:05:19.440 --> 0:05:22.160 and that this fact created a second fact, which was 0:05:22.520 --> 0:05:25.240 that I would have to demote some artists and cut 0:05:25.279 --> 0:05:27.960 others out. I would have to make the hard choices 0:05:28.240 --> 0:05:31.920 and play favorites. This whole thing, which had the potential 0:05:31.920 --> 0:05:35.280 to be a landmark event, could also result in angry 0:05:35.320 --> 0:05:39.240 faces in a ring around me. Wait, was I being 0:05:39.279 --> 0:05:42.560 set up for failure? Instantly I felt a twinge of 0:05:42.600 --> 0:05:47.719 regret of having said yes. In truth, it was an 0:05:47.760 --> 0:05:52.120 accumulated twinge. I had the previous March one an Oscar 0:05:52.200 --> 0:05:55.480 for directing Summer of Soul, a documentary about the Harlem 0:05:55.520 --> 0:05:59.880 cultural festival also known as Black Woodstock. I created the 0:05:59.880 --> 0:06:04.280 movie and a relatively calm atmosphere that was ironically enabled 0:06:04.360 --> 0:06:09.400 by the broad international crisis of pandemic. I was doing 0:06:09.440 --> 0:06:14.080 different things, living upstate, sketching on weekend mornings, getting further 0:06:14.120 --> 0:06:17.560 into meditation. But in the wake of the Oscar, I 0:06:17.600 --> 0:06:20.719 was also in demand. People were seeking me out to 0:06:20.760 --> 0:06:24.760 direct more movies. I said yes to one offer and 0:06:24.839 --> 0:06:27.640 yes to a second, and before I knew it, I 0:06:27.760 --> 0:06:31.520 was down for half a dozen commitments. I remember a 0:06:31.520 --> 0:06:34.960 conversation with my ex girlfriend, one of the last ones 0:06:35.000 --> 0:06:39.560 before we broke up. She was dismayed, you learned absolutely 0:06:39.720 --> 0:06:43.159 nothing in the last two years. She said. You told 0:06:43.160 --> 0:06:45.920 me that the less work you do and the more 0:06:46.000 --> 0:06:48.680 time you had to breathe, the more the stars aligned. 0:06:49.160 --> 0:06:51.680 You were working only on the things you wanted, and 0:06:51.760 --> 0:06:56.279 that felt good, right, I said, So, what's up with 0:06:56.320 --> 0:07:00.640 all this new work? She said, you basically just regressed. 0:07:01.080 --> 0:07:04.200 You relapsed the way a drug addict would pandemic was 0:07:04.279 --> 0:07:07.080 calm in a way, but when real life came back, 0:07:07.200 --> 0:07:10.280 you went right back to hiding in your work. She 0:07:10.400 --> 0:07:13.760 started to say something else, but stopped. What she said 0:07:13.920 --> 0:07:18.200 instead was devastating. I guess you'll have space and time 0:07:18.240 --> 0:07:22.640 for this relationship in like twenty thirty two. Then and 0:07:22.680 --> 0:07:25.600 there I told myself I would never again agree to 0:07:25.680 --> 0:07:29.080 do anything without taking time to assess it first, to 0:07:29.120 --> 0:07:32.800 see what the time management landscape looked like, to think 0:07:32.800 --> 0:07:36.320 about who other than myself might be affected. But she 0:07:36.400 --> 0:07:38.760 was right to tell me that I was wrong, and 0:07:38.800 --> 0:07:41.520 I was wrong to think that I would listen to myself. 0:07:42.280 --> 0:07:45.040 And here I was, having committed to a hip hop 0:07:45.120 --> 0:07:48.680 fifty Grammy tribute that had the potential to burn a 0:07:48.720 --> 0:07:52.040 bunch of bridges while I was standing on them. One 0:07:52.040 --> 0:07:54.440 of the bridges that it started to burn was the 0:07:54.480 --> 0:08:00.760 relationship itself. The twenty thirty two estimate now looked optimistic. Relationship, 0:08:01.200 --> 0:08:05.080 which had spanned the pandemic, started to end, and I 0:08:05.120 --> 0:08:08.320 did what she knew I'd do all along. I moved 0:08:08.320 --> 0:08:13.040 forward into more work. Specifically, I started on the Grammy 0:08:13.080 --> 0:08:17.080 Tribute project. I made a demo. I put together an 0:08:17.120 --> 0:08:19.680 audio map of the hip hop genre over the half 0:08:19.760 --> 0:08:23.280 century from nineteen seventy three, going from the earliest Bronx 0:08:23.360 --> 0:08:27.400 djaying to Jimmy Cast to Apache, and moving through all 0:08:27.440 --> 0:08:30.880 of it, every song and artists. I loved all the 0:08:30.880 --> 0:08:33.040 ones that I just mentioned, and all the ones I 0:08:33.120 --> 0:08:36.240 didn't until I got to Glorilla or Ice Spice, or 0:08:36.679 --> 0:08:40.320 whoever I thought best represented twenty twenty three. I made 0:08:40.440 --> 0:08:43.440 what I thought were all the hard choices. By the 0:08:43.480 --> 0:08:46.920 time I was finished, it was thirty three minutes and 0:08:47.080 --> 0:08:50.920 forty two seconds. I knew that the Grammys weren't going 0:08:50.960 --> 0:08:53.640 to give me that much time, but maybe I could 0:08:53.640 --> 0:08:57.079 get close. I called Jesse and Dion and asked them 0:08:57.120 --> 0:09:01.560 how long I would have. Ten minutes said maybe eleven. 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:05.360 I thought they were joking. I was sure they were joking. 0:09:06.080 --> 0:09:09.520 How could anyone paar down the entire half century to 0:09:09.559 --> 0:09:12.920 a segment that short. On top of everything else, it 0:09:12.960 --> 0:09:17.000 will require me to deliver disappointment to artists, telling some 0:09:17.760 --> 0:09:20.080 I could only use the snippet of their greatest songs, 0:09:20.520 --> 0:09:23.600 telling others I couldn't use them at all. And what 0:09:23.720 --> 0:09:27.000 about the artists who are no longer sharp performers, or 0:09:27.480 --> 0:09:30.440 who I knew wouldn't be warmly received on TV or 0:09:30.440 --> 0:09:33.079 social media? Would I have to write them out of 0:09:33.160 --> 0:09:38.040 history entirely? That's when it hit me. They suckered me 0:09:38.120 --> 0:09:41.079 into being the back cop. Is that why y'all came 0:09:41.120 --> 0:09:45.079 to me to make me the back hop? They started laughing, 0:09:45.559 --> 0:09:48.640 but the laughing didn't last that long. These things that 0:09:48.679 --> 0:09:52.080 you're bringing up, they said, they sound like yps instead 0:09:52.120 --> 0:09:57.400 of ops, meaning your problem instead of are a problem. 0:09:58.480 --> 0:10:01.360 A day later, I called Dion back. I'd work with 0:10:01.400 --> 0:10:03.760 her on the Oscars when I was the de facto 0:10:03.960 --> 0:10:07.560 orchestra and quasi host. I gave her a level with 0:10:07.679 --> 0:10:10.960 me talk. Even though I'm a creative, I'm also a 0:10:11.000 --> 0:10:14.920 suit I said, So don't shield me like I'm an artist. 0:10:15.280 --> 0:10:18.240 Tell me the truth. How much time do I really have? 0:10:19.120 --> 0:10:22.280 Ten to eleven? She said? Come on, I said, you 0:10:22.280 --> 0:10:25.679 can tell me I am telling you. She said, there 0:10:25.679 --> 0:10:28.360 are other parts of the celebration. We're going to give 0:10:28.400 --> 0:10:31.320 doctor Dre an award. You have ten to eleven minutes 0:10:31.360 --> 0:10:34.960 for your segment. Jesse and Dion are the Ashford and 0:10:35.040 --> 0:10:38.360 Simpson of production. I know when to go to Dad 0:10:38.400 --> 0:10:41.400 for some things and Mom for some other things. I 0:10:41.480 --> 0:10:45.719 rolled out my appeal Dion, I said, I need you 0:10:45.800 --> 0:10:48.959 to come through for me. You gotta find me five 0:10:49.040 --> 0:10:53.520 more minutes. Can you give another segment a haircut? I'll 0:10:53.559 --> 0:10:56.160 see what I can do, she said. She called me 0:10:56.200 --> 0:10:59.120 back the next morning. I got good news, and you 0:10:59.160 --> 0:11:02.480 didn't say bad news. I said, I got you more time. 0:11:02.600 --> 0:11:09.840 She said, how much seventeen sixteen eighteen? You have thirteen minutes? 0:11:10.440 --> 0:11:13.640 She said. She delivered the news like she had gone 0:11:13.679 --> 0:11:16.360 out and gotten venison and was going to feed the 0:11:16.400 --> 0:11:19.680 household for a month. It was spoken in triumph and 0:11:20.080 --> 0:11:23.440 a kind of finality, and the wake of that call, 0:11:23.520 --> 0:11:27.199 I thought about reindeer games I always do is one 0:11:27.200 --> 0:11:30.280 of the metaphors I've used more than any other. The 0:11:30.360 --> 0:11:34.080 roots since our inception often felt that hip hop was 0:11:34.120 --> 0:11:37.520 a party, and we were invited late or not at all. 0:11:38.280 --> 0:11:40.960 We didn't get to participate in everything that it had 0:11:40.960 --> 0:11:44.840 to offer. Even though we have the talent and the desire, 0:11:45.559 --> 0:11:48.920 gatekeepers turned us away for one reason or another, not 0:11:49.040 --> 0:11:52.640 perceived as hard enough, not making the right kinds of 0:11:52.679 --> 0:11:56.360 hits at the right time. Being Rudolph came to be 0:11:56.480 --> 0:12:00.960 my skeleton key for everything in this situation. Though I 0:12:01.040 --> 0:12:07.880 wasn't Rudolph, I was Sanna. I was the gatekeeper. All right, 0:12:07.880 --> 0:12:10.800 all right, all right, Calm down, calmdown. That's it for now. 0:12:11.440 --> 0:12:13.160 If you really enjoy what you heard, you can go 0:12:13.200 --> 0:12:16.600 to questlove dot com, q U E s T l 0:12:16.600 --> 0:12:19.839 o v e dot com in order your copy of 0:12:19.920 --> 0:12:22.720 Hip Hop Is History Today. Thank you,