?uestlove

The Roots drummer on Run-D.M.C., D'Angelo, Dilla, and more.
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Kyle Gustafson

Photo by Kyle Gustafson

Welcome to 5-10-15-20, where we talk to artists about the music they loved at five-year interval points in their lives. Maybe we'll get a detailed roadmap of how their tastes and passions helped make them who they are. Maybe we'll just learn that they really liked hearing the "CHiPs" theme song over and over when they were kids. Either way, it'll be fun.

This time, we spoke with Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson, 39. The new Roots album, How I Got Over, is out now.

Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers: "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"

When I was young, my parents pulled a cruel ruse on me-- I grew up thinking oldies music was contemporary music because my father was a doo wop singer and all of his 45s were oldies. So in 1976, my first grade teacher had us bring our favorite 45s to class. All the other kids are bringing in "Isn't She Lovely" and "Disco Duck" and I brought in "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?" by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. My music teacher was like, "Oh, this was my favorite when I was a kid." And I was like, "How is that possible? This is new, right?" Then they basically had to explain to me that what I was listening to was 20 years old. I felt like I was suckered. It was a crucial Santa Claus-isn't-real moment.

Pitchfork: Did your parents purposely try to keep stuff like Stevie Wonder away from you?

Well, Stevie Wonder was way too ubiquitous to deny. When Songs in the Key of Life came out it was a major, major, major event. I remember thinking how the damn cover looked like he was drowning in donuts. And the booklet to that album definitely started my obsession with liner notes. It's pretty much responsible for stuff like the extensive notes on Roots albums and my Twitter obsession.

The Time: "Cool"

One of the main things about Morris Day and the Time was the fact they dressed so cool. And in interviews and even on album skits, Morris always talked about wearing "baggies," which are real Cab Calloway baggy slacks that you could buy at the thrift store. So after I heard "Cool", me and my little 6th grade pack just told our parents, "Yo, we want baggies." That year, all I wore was baggies. I think I wound up looking more or less like the lone black member of Madness or the Specials more than than the Time. [laughs] But my mom liked it because it was cost efficient-- while my cousins' parents were breaking their back to buy them Jordache and Sergio, a pair of baggies in 1981 went for five bucks.

Still, you can put the kid in the baggies but, at the end of the day, I'm still a 10-year-old. I remember having this pair of maroon baggies with five pleats in them-- they were super baggy. They were perfect. And I was playing tag in recess, tripped over myself, slid, and got a big rip in the knee. That was the end of that pair.

Run-D.M.C.: "Peter Piper"

Nothing froze me more than hearing "Peter Piper" for the first time. I'd heard a breakbeat before, but that was definitely a turning point because most hip-hop production was strictly just drum machine and occasionally adding keyboard lines, whereas Rick Rubin was smart enough to add another element to a song.

The whole idea of adding a pre-recorded record was foreign to me, so I never knew how they got those drums to sound the way they did. For a long time, I thought somebody played it. It was just baffling to me. Mattel had a drum machine out called the SynSonic drums, and there was an 808 programming inside of that song that I emulated perfectly on the SynSonic drums. Then I would play real drums on top of that to mimic the beat. But I couldn't explain the animal noises that always seemed to be playing whenever those bells came up. There was a kid at my school who finally explained to me that what I was listening to is a Bob James recording that they've just looped.

De La Soul: De La Soul Is Dead

More than anything, De La Soul Is Dead prepared me for my profession. 1991 was such a banner year for hip-hop, such a coming of age. By that point, I had done all the basic homework on my fundamental hip-hop, which meant stealing all James Brown records from anyone over 50 who had neglected their record collection in basements and thrift stores and Goodwills. I also collected all of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats compilations, which were the CliffsNotes of breakbeatology and the fundamentals for all classic hip-hop records between '88 and '90. On 3 Feet High and Rising, De La used basic psych-rock stuff, but De La Soul Is Dead took obscure sampling to a whole other level. It was incredible to hear how they disassociated themselves from the very movement they built with that album.

It wasn't until I got to know those guys that I truly understood the hell they went through between '88 and '94, which literally put down a safe, plush-carpeted rug for the Roots to walk on once we stepped in the door. De La Soul pioneered this alternative lifestyle that I make a beautiful living at today and all they have to tell me are these humorous tales of pugilism. Like they got kicked off of the LL Cool J Nitro Tour for being too violent. And I'm like, "Wait a minute. Come again?" And they're like, "Yeah, motherfuckers started some shit, and we went over there and just busted them in the head." I joke all the time that the only outbreaks of violence that have ever occurred at Roots shows have always been at Toad's Place up at Yale-- of the four times we've been to that club, three of them have broken out into massive bar fights. But that's some drunken frat shit.

It seemed rather impossible that De La Soul would ever strike pay dirt again with an artistic statement as great as 3 Feet High and Rising. I guess people look at De La Soul Is Dead as sort of a blueprint for the disenchanted rapper, but every moment was jaw-dropping, from the production to the skits to their rhyme style to the sequencing. That was my blueprint from then on.

D'Angelo: "Bitch"

This one never came out-- it remains on my iPod. I mark it as the beginning of the four year journey that would be the making of Voodoo. We were working with D'Angelo on "The Hypnotic" from Illadelph Halflife, which we thought would take three days but only ended up taking about two hours to do. So we had time to kill. We just messed around in the studio, and now I realize D'Angelo was testing me to see whether or not I could speak his language.

His initial drum programming on the "Bitch" demo was very drunk-sounding, and it started the phase where I was trying to play messed up. "Bitch" by D'Angelo and "Word Play" by A Tribe Called Quest and produced by J Dilla helped me define my voice and my style for the next five years. Both of those feature very offbeat drum programming-- you'd think a real drummer's playing it because, usually, all drum machines are supposed to be quantized and perfect. When I saw Q-Tip, I was like, "Yo, did Dilla mean to do this?" And he's like, "Absolutely." I didn't know you were allowed to do that. When I finally met Dilla, the first thing I asked him was, "What were you thinking with 'Word Play'?" He says, "I dunno. I just wanted to try something new. It just sounded good to me."

A Tribe Called Quest: "Word Play"

About a year before we went into the studio to work on "Bitch", I'd taken a minor brow-beating from the Roots and from the staff at our label because they were trying to figure out why [New York radio DJ] Funkmaster Flex wasn't playing our records. Somebody said something real dismissive like, "Eh, it's probably hard for him to mix Roots music in with regular hip-hop." So then all eyes are pointed at me because I don't play with a metronome. It left me bitter because I'm like a walkin', livin' breakbeat, but now I have to work extra hard because I have to sound like a robot.

So during the whole making of Illadelph Halflife I was trying to sound as much like a drum machine as I could, basically freezing myself creatively for a year. And now D'Angelo comes along with the absolute antidote-- he wanted me to mess up on purpose. I'm like, "Dude, I just built this 12-mile high Jenga display of perfection, and now you're telling me that I have to turn my back on that and drum like I drank some moonshine behind a chuckwagon?" He's like, "That's exactly what I want you to do."

I had to sound programmed, but I had to sound messed up and live at the same time. It took me about three weeks to really get it. It was hard. And it's an ego thing, too. It's like, "Ugh, how am I going to make a name for myself when I have to do the exact opposite of what these other great drummers are doing." It got to the point where I took all the drums away. I didn't have tom toms for the longest time. I had to discipline myself. It's almost like the drum equivalent of using the Force. But then I started doing it on other records, and people were scratching their head. If you do something for Dilla or D'Angelo that's one thing, but then when you've got to go back and do it for someone who doesn't quite get your drunken style, they're like, "Why are you playing so messed up?"

Pitchfork: Did you ever just try drinking something before you played?

[laughs] Nah. But the first time I tried a hash brownie was in Europe and that show was rather humorous. Other guys can smoke all their weed and do shots of Patron and do a stellar show, but I have to be that straight-ahead dude.

Pitchfork: As someone who's worked with so many greats, from Al Green to Jay-Z, how do you rank D'Angelo?

I consider him a genius beyond words. At the same time I say to myself, "How can I scream someone's genius if they hardly have any work to show for it?" Then again, the last work he did was so powerful that it's lasted 10 years.

Jay-Z: "La-La-La (Excuse Me Miss Again)"

Can we cheat a little and do 31? Because in 2002 this quasi-remix of Jay-Z's "Excuse Me Miss" by the Neptunes came out, and there's a line where he says, "I'll show you how to do this, son." But there's a gap in that line and in that gap, there is the sound of a combined drum slam on a tom-tom: Boodoop! [Listen to the song here.]

The sound is like the drummer version of "you dropped something," like butterfingers. So when I would drop a stick during a show, [Roots percussionist] Frank [Knuckles] would go boodoop, just like the Jay-Z record. It became so annoying to the rest of the band, they're like, "Yo, why do you keep on boodoop every two seconds?" Then, all of a sudden, [guitarist] Kirk [Douglas] would trip over a mic chord. Boodoop! [MC] Tariq [Trotter, aka Black Thought] would forget a lyric. Boodoop!

Then everyone wanted their own version of boodoop-- our keyboardist Kamal [Gray] started playing a certain dissonant chord, Kirk had his own thing. We now can officially be like Waldorf and Statler, the two Muppets on the balcony that are snarkin' everybody without anybody being the wiser. Now we've just added too much onto it-- it's past Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring". We will not hesitate to sabotage a song. Just imagine the Animaniacs as a band. A bunch of immature 11-year-olds. But it all started off with a very harmless slam that came out in 2002.

One time I was talking to Pharrell and he was like, "Yo man, it's beautiful the way that you all look each other in the eye and communicate onstage-- like how you do a rhythm on the drum and Frank answers you back." I was like, "Dude, you started that shit." I think if you asked him about the greatest compliment I ever paid him, he might tell you that story. I still don't think he quite gets that he's the genesis of this thing that has really bonded the Roots as a band.

In 2001, we were opening open for the Chili Peppers in these 80,000-seat soccer stadiums in Europe, and after every song they would go to the center of the stage and have a meeting. I asked Anthony Kiedis about it and he said, "We just want to talk first. Sometimes it's just about how I have a craving for crawfish." And I was like, "Wait, so you all talk about dinner?!" That's something I was really envious about. I told my manager about their onstage meetings and he's like, "Well, that's because they're friends. You guys aren't friends, you're associates. You don't do anything together besides play."

Before that, if somebody messed up, I would've been on some drill sergeant, James Brown shit, like: "You fucked up, I'm berating you on stage." But now, I can't wait until someone fucks up, 'cause that makes the show fun. It's weird that that's Jay-Z's prime contribution to our lives-- bigger than even signing us to Def Jam. He wouldn't even get it. [laughs] But he would definitely take the credit: "Oh yeah, I can see me bonding y'all together."

J Dilla: Donuts

In 2006, the project that affected me the most was Dilla's swan song. Though I didn't understand it at first. I was thinking it was about how Kanye's the new kid on the block and he's bringing soul samples back so Dilla was trying to say, "Nope, my dick's still bigger than yours, son." But it all seemed to make sense towards the end. I got to talk to him three weeks before he passed, and I was like, "Yo, what was on your mind with Donuts?" He said, "It's a message." I was like, "Hm, OK." Once he left, I started to clearly see all the subliminal messages. Like "Don't Cry", and him mangling the shit out of "Johnny Don't Do It" by 10cc on "Waves"-- that's a message to his brother John:

I saw him about three months before he passed and he couldn't even talk and I couldn't walk in the room. We weren't prepared for that. But what was even crazier is when I walked in the house, I heard music. I'm like, "He's working on shit!" And I see him and he's in a wheelchair and hooked up to a machine. It was just baffling to me that that part of his brain had not expired. His sense of rhythm and all that stuff was still the same. At first, I thought he was going to get through it.

But then he gave me his prized possession record, and that really scared me. It's a very rare Brazilian Stevie Wonder EP. He said, "This is for you." And I was like, "Why? You've had this for so long." I didn't want to take it because it seemed too final. His mom came up behind me and put it in my hands. I just walked out of the house and didn't know if I should start bawling or just accept it. He didn't want to live like that. His mom told me he made his last beat-- which was a very unusual flip of Funkadelic's "America Eats Its Young"-- and told her, "I think I'm ready." He laid on the couch and, two hours later, he expired. I'm obsessed with whatever I can get from Donuts.