The Roots
Interview with Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson
Words: Scott Harrell
Photos: Chago Akii-bua and Brian Jones

Philly hip-hop/live-music hybrid The Roots has presented a true alternative to rap's increasingly postured confines for 20 years now, and not just because they're a hell of a live band. As the group's ninth (or tenth, depending on who you ask) album, the galvanizing, personally political Rising Down goes to the presses, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson posits that the real secret to The Roots' substantial originality comes from their commitment to reflecting both themselves and the world around them.

REAX:  When your press guys sent me the album, they were very, very concerned about leaks, like most industry people. How concerned about it are you personally?
?uestlove:  Um, I know it's an eventual thing, but you know, the only thing that concerns me about it is, I think most people in their heads, especially black artists, think you're bootlegging it. My own concern is the fanbase will feel like there's nothing to look forward to on April 29, 2008, you know? laughs And being that all we have is our first-week sales and our critical acclaim laughs, we need everything possible. The idea of Gnarls Barkley putting their album out early on iTunes, it's sort of a head-scratcher, because if they'd just waited ‘til today, I'm sure they would've seen more than 36,000 units. But I understand it's the technological age.

REAX:  Have you gone online and looked for torrents of your own stuff before it was released?
?uestlove:  Yeah. I was the one that discovered the new song “Birthday Girl” got released. I was like, OK, whoever did it, you would've thought they would've released the whole record. If they've got that, they've got the whole thing.

But all that was for naught, now that it's not even on the record. Ha Ha!

REAX:  Is that the main reason why you took the song off the record, or was it more because it just didn't fit the mood and theme of the whole thing?
?uestlove:  Really, that's the thing that kind of bothered me from the beginning. We've had that song since The Tipping Point, in some sort of incomplete form. And then I guess when it was time to find a home for it on the record, in some sort of feng shui, it just wouldn't go anywhere. It's like, you know, we've got songs about high school shootings and Unabombers, and all these songs about more thorny political issues, and then here comes “Birthday Girl.” We tried every combination possible We had a funny presentation we were gonna do in which it was gonna appear like it was a commercial break. Do you remember Weezer's video for “Buddy Holly,” how they went to commercial break in the middle? I was actually thinking of interrupting one of the songs, having part of it, then having a voice say we'd be right back after these messages, and “Birthday Girl” would be like the commercial break. But as funny as it sounded, it would've taken the urgency and edge off the record. Even as a hidden track, it couldn't find a home. So in the age of digital technology, give it to iTunes, make it an exclusive, and it'll be on the international record. But at the end of the day, I want this record to have the bookends of “Rising Down” and “Rising Up”.

REAX:  But the record is kind of eclectic, especially compared to the flow of Game Theory. Against Game Theory, Rising Down almost sounds like a mixtape.
?uestlove:  Game Theory was the sound of sadness. I think sadness is an emotion that hip-hoppers really aren't allowed to show. They can show love, hatred, they can show all points in between. But sadness is probably the one emotion that can turn the hip-hop nation into a more three-dimensional thing.

That's the thing that's more important to me. You can use your dimensions in a political record. My whole point is, can we look in, can we be more three dimensional? 'Cause there's really no dimension behind some lyrics. It shows a person's cleverness, their agility and their speed for thinking. Just in terms of how we're perceived, Game Theory is just a record where we sort of turned it inwards, and looked in. Game Theory's not as political as it is observational, where this album’s very about political issues, and not coming from a third person, Save The Whales type of angle.

In “Singing Man” from the new album, one could easily misconstrue vocalist Porn as the campus shooter, as a person who advocated campus shootings, or at least as playing devil's advocate. So we really had to concentrate. That's the challenge, so you know the perspective of where we're taking it. It's much more interesting when you're speaking from the angle of the person, you know? You go into the mindset of the person that does it; it's a much more interesting narrative. But you also have to be careful, especially with the Virginia Tech tragedy being so fresh. It's a thin line to play on. And I thought we were successful in executing the story about having people scratch their heads as to why people do that.

REAX:  It's funny that you talk so much about concentrating and taking responsibility for the perspective of the music. Because it seems to me that, while themes of paranoia surface again, Rising Down itself actually deals a little more with the idea of personal responsibility, looking at the way people act and justify their actions, and how that bodes for the future.
?uestlove:  Yeah. It's us taking half the national approach, and half the local approach. It's a double whammy of an album, because we're mired in political controversy as a nation, but then it's like one of those kung fu movies, where there's a panorama of the whole city or the whole world and then it just zooms into the eye of Bruce Lee, you know? We live in Philadelphia, which, paraphrased, is the murder capital of the United States of America. Which is just the murder capital. Imagine the muggings that go unreported, and the other things, fights, on all levels. So, I feel it, that is, how bad it is. I feel it. It's almost to the point now where - I'll say in the last six months, but really I've only been home maybe for three weeks during that time, so let's say I've been stopped by the cops in that three-week period over six months. There's a one out of three chance that if I get in my car tonight, should I decide I wanna get a fish sandwich at one in the morning, that a cop might think that I stole my car from a college student, or “this is a routine check,” that's their thing now, sobriety checkpoints. That's just unfortunately normal now in 2008.

Not to mention just the situations we go through. People we know that died, that got knocked up, people you've gotta bail out, people that are asking you for financial help because their lives depend on it. Making sure the people that you care about are not in harm's way – that's all I want. All that adds to the approach. Yeah. This album's coming from people that see what's going on in the world, and also live in the most fucked-up city in the United States.

REAX:  That's a pretty big boast. It seems like things are fucked up everywhere.
?uestlove:  Yeah, but Philly makes The Wire look like Friends. laughs I'm serious. At least Baltimore has jovial music behind its violence, you know?

REAX:  Songs on the album deal with everything from mainstream pop's willingness to indulge in gangsta stereotypes to the Bush administration's irresponsible handling of the war. Do you think that all of these things are to blame for influencing our culture and even individual thought in a negative, ends-justify-the-means way?
?uestlove:  It's the chickens coming home to roost, I think. I think there's a level of pathological nihilism that's really just based on – I don't want to harp on the Bush administration, but ... it's to the point now where some people are like “damn, this motherfucker took the leadership position on some coup de tat shit.” And the quote we always remember, and I always say that, because I can name 12 black comedians that have joked about this, they talk about how “Bush is gangsta, because he said you don't have to vote for me, I'm still going to be your president – damn, that's gangsta.” Even though it was said in a humorous way, that speaks in some underhanded, Enemy of the State type way. That's a movie we've all seen - how can a man so innocent have his life so completely fucked up by the government? That's some shit black people can relate to, not in terms of the technological aspect, but just the whole idea of rockin' the boat.

I just think that, even though it's not said directly, that's probably why we haven't heard from more conscious artists speaking on what happened. Because it was really some fucked up shit. But it's like nobody, not even Al Gore talks about it. He's like, “oh, I lost.” The only person I saw mad at the situation was in the first twenty minutes of Fahrenheit 9/11. The congressional hearings about Florida's vote count, a lot of the black house committee people were visibly angry, even more angry than Gore. That was the only time I saw it.

There was this silence that you really couldn't put your finger on. I did this interview for The Believer in 2002, and I said that the greatest thing about the Bush administration is that I know the music's gonna be incredible, because in the worst political times, the black people, even back to jazz during the Depression, we find a way to find our happiness in the art of music. But no, shit didn't swing our way. We got more apolitical, more nihilistic, more in denial, and it sort of makes us look like paranoid fools. Meanwhile, I'm like OK, D'Angelo, Lauren, is anyone gonna step up to the plate? We sort of felt like that scene in The Three Stooges when they're all in the army, and they ask who wants to go to the front lines, and everybody but them steps backwards.

I don't think it's some conscious decision to become anarchists and fuck shit up, I just think that there's such a fear, an unspoken fear out there, that just puts someone in a position of silence, and that silence turns into denial. You have to create an alternative reality for yourself.

If you look at the music black people produced between 2000 and 2008, you wouldn't have any idea whatsoever that this is one of the worst political times since The Great Depression, or since the Jim Crow laws.

REAX:  The album ends on a comparatively inspirational note, though, with “The Show” and “Rising Up.” Was the sequence meant to inspire hope?
?uestlove:  That's absolutely why. That was the biggest challenge.

To tell you the truth, I think this album backwards is exactly how I would've initially executed it. In my head, “The Show” almost sounds like a mission statement. And I think that if it were to be first, it would almost sound defiant, as opposed to hopeful or optimistic. And “Rising Up” would've almost sounded like complaining. Had those songs been at the beginning, it would have made us targets for people pointing their fingers, saying we're whining about the way it used to be. But at the end, it's hopeful. I don't know why, but that's what I think.

REAX:  That it ended up the other way around, with the songs at the end, does that mean you found some optimism yourself, some hope you maybe didn't know was there?
?uestlove:  It's always been there, really. It's kind of hard, representing your ideology, and then representing yourself. Anybody that knows me knows that I'm goofy. I'm serious when it's time to be serious, but my shit is goofy, which is just – I think because we had had such a downer moment the last album, we were really careful about tugging the heartstrings. 

Really, that's probably why “Birthday Girl” was on there in the first place. Despite the whole blog-flogging thing bloggers did about “Birthday Girl,” probably in our heads we wanted to show people we don't take ourselves that goddamn seriously. If anything, I guess people think our agenda is about how serious we are, but my primary concern is that we have to show people we're three-dimensional, because being a caricature in hip-hop is almost the norm. 

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