Questlove declares the 'history' of hip-hop in more ways than one

Questlove, the accomplished musician, filmmaker and author of the latest book “Hip-Hop Is History,” is certainly aware that his title has more than one meaning. He indicates that hip-hop is an important musical genre and that part of its importance lies in the past.

I read Questlove's 2013 memoir, “Mo' Meta Blues,“ when I was starting the doctoral program that would end Present a hip-hop album as my thesis.. Some of the history he writes about in his latest book opened space for my current career.

I have written that “hip-hop is cool” as a way of saying that America is addicted, abusive, and deeply involved in the exploitation and sanctioning of blackness and black cultural products, including but not limited to hip-hop and rap. So I appreciate the way Questlove anchors each section of “Hip-Hop Is History” to specific drugs, starting with “the bright light of the cocaine years in disco”; proceeding through “the forty ounces era (1982-1987)”, “crack (1987-1992)”, “grass (1992-1997)”, “ecstasy (1997-2002)”, “sizzle (2002-2007)”, “molly (2007-2012)”, “pain pills (2012-2017)” and “opioids (2017-2022)”; and ending with what he calls “the tragic present of fentanyl.” He could have accurately subtitled the book: “What I've Watched the World Get High Over the Last 50 Years.”

It is a trip worth taking. Questlove's integrated narration of the infamous Source Awards 1995, which stoked tensions between regional factions of the genre, finds the author at his narrative best, detailing the historical stakes without pretending he's not personally interested in the outcome. Questlove is documenting a Great War within what he considers an established hip-hop nation, and the most powerful weapon, the pen that records hip-hop history, ultimately prevails. By wielding it, Questlove ascends to the sort of elevated position where one should be warned, as the Wu-Tang Clan put it: “Protect your neck.”

Last month, amid back-and-forth albums from Drake and Kendrick Lamar, Questlove wrote on Instagram that “hip hop is really dead.” Because Roots co-founder Questlove, winner of six Grammys and an Oscar, has so much going for hip-hop, what he says matters to people. It's important for people who identify with the culture and genre, and it's important for people who don't know much about hip-hop and look to experts for guidance. His dying declaration created waves because for some people, this Hip-Hop Nation is a real place, and that place is worth defending.

If you hear certain people tell it, it is a nation in desperate need of governance, regime change, or a return to a past when things were much simpler and better. Even if hip-hop's coordinates are beyond any map, figures like Questlove become cartographers, tour guides, ambassadors and, well, historians.

To me, it's a difficult metaphor to maintain if every president in the nation is facing impeachment and all its kings have to worry about their necks. Maintaining such a nation would require a pen mightier than any sword to do the structuring and saving work that might be necessary for the nation's future. Such a powerful pen could easily find its way into hip-hop's revisionist, right-wing discourse.

An authoritative pen with less sinister intentions could easily lapse into a solipsistic healing of the past. This can happen when the historian is writing a history to which he is very close and in which he plays an important role. This may explain Questlove's occasional informal shifts from an objective, omniscient account of “important events” that sound like traditional history to incredibly personal and subjective opinions.

The first half of the book describes and takes place in what could be considered typical hip-hop historical settings: Philadelphia, New York and California, but actually Compton. If this Hip-Hop Nation worked like the sidewalks in Michael Jackson's “Billie Jean” video (their squares light up only when Questlove steps on them), most of America would remain dark for the first 150 pages.

He later admits that he couldn't understand the importance of Southern rap until he came to it through his hometown of Philadelphia. “Gangsta Grillz” by DJ Drama The mixtapes were popular enough to be the target of a 2007 police raid in Atlanta. Questlove's Roots bandmate Black Thought informed him that “DJ Drama is Tyree [Simmons] of Philadelphia.” This was nearly two decades after the release of Southern rap pioneers 8Ball & MJG's debut album, but the importance of the group and its accomplices registered on Questlove only because of this incidental connection.

There are other dissonances in Questlove's story. He describes the inspiration for A Tribe Called Quest’s “Bonita Applebum” as the woman to whom the “pretty apple-shaped butt” belonged. He calls singer-songwriter Solange Knowles a “young jaw” or “thing” and wonders if she “really knew what she was doing.” He then ironically criticizes the “questionable treatment of women” in Dirty South’s rap.

Questlove makes his musical likes and dislikes known with few reservations, disdainful of anything not directly related to the nation as he knows it. He saw the nation as he was being born, built around him in his formative years and through the development of him as an artist and the emergence of him as an elder statesman and historian. At the end of the book, he is writing from a future that somehow still is America and a future Hip-Hop nation that somehow still exists.

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

When I came to the future he imagines as a reader, it was a miracle to me that imagination has not pushed us beyond the fictions we know all nations to be. It is not only the arbitrariness of borders but also the map's inability to truly represent everything we know the world encompasses. Stories may claim to be definitive, but they will always raise questions about what was left out and why.

I hope that Questlove’s “Hip-Hop Is History” is not an invitation to repeat history by registering the genre in the molds prescribed by American history. Rather, it should be a challenge to take advantage of opportunities to make the story more hip-hop. In this sense, the indexes containing Questlove's playlists are perhaps the most instructive and representative parts of the book.

We're not yet at the point where song files are seen as complete texts that tell everything we need to call them a story. However, the hip-hop that made a career like mine possible gives way to new horizons, so maybe we are on the right path.

AD Carson is an associate professor of hip-hop and the Global South and a member of the Shannon Center for Advanced Research at the University of Virginia.