MO' META Blues Part 1

MO' META BLUES.

by Ahmir Questlove Thompson.

CHAPTER ONE

So what's this gonna be, Ahmir?

A memoir.

The f.u.c.k does that mean?

You don't know what memoir means?? A life story, told by the person who lived it.

I know what the word memoir means. But what about the idea? What does it mean to you?

Well, that depends. This book should be different. I don't want it to be your average book.

What does that mean?

I don't know yet. Maybe it's just an ongoing process of questions leading to more questions. I'll say this: as a reader of music memoirs, I never begin where I'm told to start. As a rule I find myself starting at chapter 3 or 4, because before that, every music memoir has the same shape. It starts off with a simple statement about childhood: "I was born in this city, in this year. My dad did this." But I don't want to start that way. I can't start that way. I won't.

Then, after that, there's a predictable move. The main character discovers music. Dude's walking past a window and hears a symphony that turns his head, or he's at a favorite uncle's house and someone puts Louis Armstrong's Hot Fives and Sevens on the record player and, just like that, bam, it's like he's been struck by lightning. His life is changed forever. That's an exciting moment, but it's also predictable and oversimplified, for sure.

So those first chapters aren't important?

How can you say what's important in a life, really? Could you sum up a whole life in twenty chapters? Or would it take twenty-one? And why is the person who lived the life the only one talking? Could you pa.s.s the mic, let someone else talk, and just shut the h.e.l.l up for a minute and let them call you on your inevitable bulls.h.i.+t? I don't know exactly what would work, but experimenting is more interesting than just telling the story straight through from A to Z.

I'm just glad that you don't want to do a whole f.u.c.king book about obscure soul tracks. How many times can you talk about Clyde Stubblefield or Gene McDaniels and make lists for Pitchfork or Rolling Stone?

But sometimes I only remember things through records. They're a trigger for me, they're Pavlov's bell. Without thinking about the music, I can't remember the experience. But if I think long enough about a specific alb.u.m, something else always bubbles up.

Well then maybe you should do a book that just goes through your life, year by year, using only records.

I could try to pick one record for every year of my life, but I'd have to stop in the mid-nineties, 'cause it's not the same picking records as a fan after I start as a recording artist. Would that work? It might. Think of all the different ways that stories get told. I'm working with the James Brown people on a movie that will end up being the closest thing to a biopic that can possibly exist for a man like that, who was actively working for fifty years. The story is too big to tell straight on through, so they decided to deal with it by breaking it into five different episodes, five representative short stories. Or take that Hendrix movie that Andre 3000 is starring in. It has nothing to do with the legend of Jimi Hendrix, really. It's about twenty-four hours in the life of a working musician, and all the stresses that come along with that-the girls, the drugs, the managers, the need to find time to breathe creatively. Or maybe there's a book that tells a story somewhat straightforwardly, but with a growing awareness that it's only telling part of the story. How can a man in his early forties hope to really talk about his life as a whole? It's like reviewing the first half of a song.

Don't people want to hear about the groupies in the hotel? Don't they want to hear about the time you got into a limo with a certain female head of state, who shall remain nameless?

Look, man, I've read plenty of hip-hop memoirs, and most of them have only one story to tell: rise, bling, fall, and lots of debauchery along the way. That's not my story. I haven't lived an interesting life in that sense. I won't pretend otherwise. I haven't had many Motley Crue evenings... though I know those guys and I hung out with them one night and I saw things.

What kinds of things?

That's another issue. Do I keep certain stories to myself? Do I betray confidences? Does no other musician writing a book struggle with this s.h.i.+t? I don't get it. If I was with someone and I saw something crazy, is it really my job to tell that story and expose that person just to make other people more interested in my book? Let's say I know a juicy story about Singer X. Do I tell it? Do I keep him or her anonymous? Create a composite? Fudge the details? It seems like most of these books are content to be Jell-O from the same mold. So maybe the answer is in some unholy hybrid: some straightforward memoir, some fodder for the recordheads, some tricks and treats, some protecting the innocent, some protecting the not-so-innocent.

You really think you need a special form to tell it? Come on, dawg. At the root, why does your story require that?

Is that a joke?

Why would it be?

Because of the Roots.

You mean because of that simple pun? You think I'd stoop to something like that? What the f.u.c.k? Tell me why your story matters.

Because we're the last hip-hop band, absolutely the last of a dying breed. Twenty-five years ago, rap acts were mostly groups. You had Run DMC and the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy, and you even had bands of bands, like the Native Tongues collective, which was three loosely affiliated groups: De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Jungle Brothers. I grew up looking at that model, at the sense of community and of a larger purpose. Even the negative things that came out of that arrangement, like compet.i.tion and tension and sibling rivalry, were productive-that's what you get when you group. But today it's all solo acts. Maybe it's just simple economics. Everyone thinks, "I'm Michael Jordan and I can do this on my own and pick up the big check." And maybe you can't blame people for that. The system isn't set up to think about it, not at all. New acts wors.h.i.+p the star system because they see the highlight films, and that's all they can see, because that's how the experience is packaged. Solo acts are also easier for labels to deal with: they're easier to control, and you don't need to do any dividing to conquering. Even if I think of this as my book, it's never only my story. It's the story of other musicians, of other hip-hop groups, of other minds. The Roots is literally the last band on the caboose of that train. But maybe I should save that for the book.

We're in the book.

We are?

We're always already in the book. We've always already been in the book.

CHAPTER TWO

From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]

To: Ben Greenberg [editor]

Re: Meetings

Nah, I wouldn't say that Ahmir's been scarce, just busy. He has the Jimmy Fallon show most days and he DJs most nights, and when the show is on vacation, that's when they schedule Roots events like the summer picnic. But when he isn't otherwise spoken for, he's been great about clearing out s.p.a.ce for the book. He's really into the process. He talks for hours.

While we wait for his schedule to level off, though, I've been talking with Richard Nichols, the group's comanager since day one, and that's been an experience, to say the least. For starters, Rich has got this great look; here's a picture I got from Ginny Suss at Okayplayer.

Ahmir describes him as "Nipsey Russell with dreadlocks." When you start talking to him, though, he isn't like Nipsey Russell at all. (I'm guessing here: I never met Nipsey Russell.) Rich is supremely a.n.a.lytical, extremely verbal, and entirely determined to digest, process, present, and represent the Roots' whole experience. He has been central to the growth of the enterprise-in helping to strategize the moments when they grabbed for the bra.s.s ring as well as the moments where they sat back and thought about what the bra.s.s ring meant. He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What's black culture? What's hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn't bloodlessly academic, either; there's something very consequential about his approach. You know how in comic books there's sometimes a supervillain who's a giant brain in a jar, and there are underground tubes leading out of that jar to the airport and the power plant and the bank to show you how he's in control of everything? Rich is like a non-evil version of that.

So Ahmir and I were talking about Rich and Ahmir had an idea. "I think Rich should have a say in the book," he said. I agreed, and outlined some of the options: an intro, an afterword. "No," he said. "I mean that he could literally speak out over the course of the book." Do you think that would work? Ahmir could be in one font and Rich could be in another, and they can be in dialogue, trying to work out their ideas. What kind of book could that be? Would it illuminate? Complicate? Clot? Whatever. Think about it. Let me know.

CHAPTER THREE

Where do I start?

I was born in West Philadelphia in January 1971. My father, Lee Andrews, had been a pioneering doo-wop singer with his group, the Hearts. They had a handful of hits-"Long Lonely Nights," "Tear Drops," "Try the Impossible"-that went Top 40, or close to it. My mother, Jacqueline, had been a model and a dancer, and she and my father opened up a store called Klothes Kloset on 52nd Street. When they started their business, in the mid-sixties, Philadelphia was a colorful, peaceful place that got steadily bleaker as the turbulence of the later part of the decade intensified. Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in Memphis. Gangs moved into the neighborhood, and drugs came in with the gangs. My parents' store closed when their wealthy customers fled the city. At the same time, radical black political groups were taking hold. MOVE, a black liberation organization whose members all wore their hair in dreadlocks and all took "Africa" as their last name, started in Philly in 1972, and their headquarters was just a few blocks away from our house on Osage Avenue in West Philadelphia.

I say "our house" because by that time I'd arrived, joining my mother, my father, and my older sister, Donn. We had a comfortable life-our little two-story house, our close-knit family, and our music. Even though the doo-wop music my father had grown up with was long gone, music was central to our family in almost every way. We had more records than I knew what to do with, and either the radio or the TV was always on, playing music. It was soul and it was rock, and I guess some of it was proto-disco (from the Greek protos, meaning first, signifying the earliest or most primitive form-so it wasn't disco yet but it was getting there).

Wait, wait, stop. Let me back it up.