Amir Questlove–Thompson
speaker
268 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Amir Questlove–Thompson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And being singled out for positive reasons or negative reasons is such a nightmare for most black people. And yes, in this case... Why? Because... you're going to be separated. Like for a lot of black people, it's, you come up in the neighborhood, you know, your next door neighbors, you, you spend the night at your cousin's house.
And then in the snap, suddenly, you know, I'm, I'm a Macaulay Calkins character staying at the four seasons hotel, like by myself in the lap of luxury. And, um, that's an alienating feeling because you can't take everyone with you. You can't save everyone. Um,
Um, you know, I grew up in a neighborhood in which I had between the two neighbors, you know, my grandmother's house and my house, like I had 30 plus friends and now it's just four of us. Like I'm one of four who's not dead or in jail. And so there's, there's a constant, like, why me? Why was I chosen? My cousin was just as smart as I was. And that person plays drums better than me.
Like, they should have been in this position. Like, there's an imposter syndrome thing that happens and just a feeling of guilt that one feels. And, you know, the Panthers sort of approached Sly and was like, okay, well, you know, you're talking about these political subjects that we're about, so we want you to be our leader and fund our movement. And Sly fundamentally doesn't...
necessarily agree like he's not that revolutionary, even though he has the ability to channel in the feeling of a revolutionary. So what winds up happening is for every time the pressure is on Sly to prove his blackness, the more success he gets is He just winds up—his only answer is to create blacker music.
So, you know, the pressure of everyday people leads to Stan, and then the pressure of Stan leads to basically the ribbon-cutting of funk, the very first funk song, which is Thank You for Let Me Be Myself Again. You know, it's kind of like this brilliant deflection thing, like his version of— Hey, guys, what's that over there? You know, it may turn around and then like he's gone.
Instead, he'll just say, here's an even funkier song to prove that I'm super black, you know, and that's that's kind of how he gets out these situations. He he has to performatively. Yeah. For me, it's probably 41 of the most painful documented minutes in a creator's life. Like, this is clearly someone who is an unwilling participant.
In his journey, like, I hear someone crying for help, but because the music is so awesome and so mind-blowing, you know, we wind up fetishizing his art, and you don't see the pain of it. Or the fact that Black Pain is so... beautiful.
Like, the sound of Aretha Franklin's voice, like, yeah, we'll say, like, it's so soulful, so... But no, Aretha Franklin's voice is the sound of a woman who never had a relationship with her own mother, whose mother rejected her, and... when you hear her beautiful voice, that's, that's the sound of pain.
So somehow, you know, a lot of black music that we love, you know, the, the sound of Ray Charles's voice, the sound of Stevie Wonder's voice, the sound, what we're really getting off on is, is their pain, which I'm guilty of it, but you know, it's problematic and it's also a pleasure, you know, and I, I feel guilty that, Sometimes I get off on someone's pain.
We do, but see, here's the problem with that, though. One of my mentors who passed away, writer Greg Tate, he wrote a book called Everything But the Burden. And what that essentially means is that oftentimes black art, black pain is just so beautiful that oftentimes, you know, we'll take everything. We'll take the dancing. We'll take the fashion. We'll take the lingo. We'll take the singing.
We'll take everything but the burden and the pain that it takes to – reach that level of art for me one of the best examples every time I DJ there's a song by James Brown called It's a New Day and probably three minutes into that song James Brown does a level of screaming that is beyond just ad-libs.
Every time I DJ this song, it's so awesomely danceable and funky, but also so painful to hear because James Brown is a person that was an orphan that grew up in a brothel. His mother gave him away. His father gave him away. So that feeling of rejection he had all of his life, all that pain is coming out in this song. And that's kind of the thing. It's everything but the burden.
That's kind of the empathetic way that we wanted to paint this story that, you know, because people often just say like, wow, he he had everything and he was a genius. And then he chose drugs.
Yeah. For me, it's like what happened in his life that made him want to choose drugs? And that's the question that no one could answer. Like, especially like when I interviewed Clive Davis and Clive has a history of, you know, there's Janis Joplin, there's Whitney Houston, there's Sly Stone, there's, you know, all these artists that have sort of famously succumbed to darker demons.
And, you know, I kind of asked him like, well, you know, I think it's more than just like, oh, he was hanging with the wrong crowd and, you know, chose cocaine instead. And, When I asked him, like, what circumstances do you think that he was going through during that period he was on your label that you might not have been aware of? And this is definitely not just a story of Sly Stone.
This is a story of anyone I've ever worked with. This is a story of Frank Ocean or Lauryn Hill or Dave Chappelle, Kanye West. Like, anyone who's ever been mired in trouble. Anyone you ever ask, like, why are they doing this? Like... Everyone goes through this.
Um... One, to the pressure of writing game-changing music. You know, Sly's the first person to use a drum machine. Sly's kind of the pioneer of the bedroom do-it-all-yourself musician. You know, there's the pressure of feeding the machine, of writing the hits, of keep winning. You know, there's the idea of what... you are versus who you really are.
As the generations go on, like Sly was unable to do that. And when he drops the baton, there was someone in the wings waiting to pick that baton up. And at the time that person was 12 years old and that person's name was Michael Joseph Jackson. So Michael Jackson will wind up picking up the baton of what should have happened to Sly.
And then 10 years later in 1982, Michael himself will go through that same process of being the chosen one, being the God, being the unifier, being the center of attention. And then suddenly he'll just wind up on a kind of a hamster wheel of chasing perfection. And this happens to everyone. Prince, Whitney Houston.
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