16. ?uestloveI love talking about music, and listening to people talk about music (perhaps, to paraphrase Martin Mull, I’d also enjoy dancing about architecture). I’m a sucker for someone who can talk a good game about music, and ?uestlove is probably the best in the world. He is the Dr. Pangloss of musicbabble -- he knows everything about all the best examples of the best kinds of music. Like Indiana Jones in the jungles of Peru, he is always chasing where no one else has looked, always a step ahead of the rolling boulder of boredom.
Which makes it kind of a bummer that his band, The Roots, suck. (I realize this is not a popular opinion, but it happens to be true). The Roots’ monochrome hip hop bears no resemblance to ?uestlove’s Technicolor mission.
Thankfully, he’s also a DJ. And unlike, say, Giles Peterson, he’s more than a box of records, he’s a proper club killer: I saw him play at home in Philly and it was palm-of-the-hand, crowd-orchestration city. He is the only DJ I’ve ever seen play several hours of tunes that lots of people in the crowd recognized … and yet every track went over like a huge surprise. You know that feeling when a house DJ mixes in a familiar melody -- say, Blue Monday, or Prince -- in the middle of two-hours of instrumental house? With ?uestlove, every record was that record.
Which made for just about the perfect party, and a perfect explanation of what all that talk was really about.
https://www.mixcloud.com/egotthejazz/questlove-live-the-jew-ma-122711/
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