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
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.
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.
You can't live off of just greasy fatty foods and stayin' up till six in the mornin' just partyin'. You gotta take care of yourself.
My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that.
Crack offered a lot of money to the inner-city youth who didn't go to college. Which enabled them to become businessmen. I know about maybe five people in the entertainment industry who did their peak work as a result of crack usage.
For anyone that's ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it's always followed by the departure period right after.
I never want to get to that level of poverty where taking a bath has to be a hot-pot experience.
I was born at a very crucial time. I consider 1968 to be the Mason Dixon line between pre- and post-civil rights generation ideas, whereas a lot of people born before '68 they kind of went into that Moses mentality. Like, I'm not going to make it, you know, I don't have any hope.
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."
Every time a new record started, people exhaled with pleasure, or their bodies moved automatically. I really started getting high off of the euphoric exclamations. Every record I put on was like a baptism.
The Chronic represented everything that I hated about hip-hop as a fan, but then later represented everything that I stood for as a musician and engineer.
Classical music requires an immense amount of concentration, and I don't know if I would've been that committed to that particular life.