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
All we sell is the Greatest feeling on Earth
I was one of those skeptics that thought that yoga was for kooks. Now I'm on a very strict regimen. You know, I work out. That's another thing I've learned relaxin', sleep, yoga. I didn't know that that's as crucial as going hard, as workin' hard, as exercising hard. I never knew. I thought that, "Okay, I gotta be at the gym like five hours everyday going balls to the wall." And what my yoga instructor, what my trainer, what they're trying to teach me is that, "No, it's sleep." That's important. That's just as important as workin' out.
Hip-hop is so much about character and caricature that people just see you as a character. Very rarely are you flesh and bone to people.
Music has the power to stop time. But music also keeps time,
I keep moving through time and time keeps moving through me. And through that process, life takes shape. The question is what shape it is. I'm not the first person to ask that question, or to see how absurd it is to think there's a real answer. Maybe life's a circle...
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.
I grew up in somewhat of a war zone in West Philadelphia in 1985, '86. It wasn't as extreme as someone coming in the classroom and just unloading on a class, but I knew to take the scenic route to go to the grocery store to avoid certain elements.
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.
How do you plan a rebirth? I'm not sure you do. You just stand in the darkness until you can't endure it any long, and then you move forward until you're standing in the light.
It was absolutely killing me that I've spent the first 25 years of my life tryin' to avoid bullets. That was always the main concern. Don't go out late. Don't go to any shady neighborhoods. Don't hang in bars alone. Why? Because you wanna avoid bullets. So once I get to 35 then I was like "Woo, okay. Made it." And now there's a new warning. Now it's like strokes; I gotta watch my health.
Time will tell. Time is always telling. Time never stops telling,
Funk never dies. It is eternal. It just smells a little different from time to time.
When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life.
I want to be as healthy as I can be so I can make it past 50; make it past 60 and make it past 70.