History, as the saying goes, is written by the victors. While that may have been true in Winston Churchill’s time, these days anyone with a blog (or, say, TikTok) and access to Wikipedia can be a hack historian. But to tell history honestly, to provide proper context and historical impact, one must be passionately — even obsessively — conversant with the subject. With regard to music and music history, few people today are more passionate about this subject than Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson.
DJ, producer, author, film director, podcast host and, of course, drummer and bandleader for seminal hip-hop crew the Roots, Questlove has beyond a doubt proved his credentials as one of today’s foremost music experts. With his sixth book, “Music Is History,” Questlove aims to place music in its historical context. Beginning in 1971 — the year of his birth — Questlove selects and examines one or more pivotal songs from each of the 50 years that followed, creating a sort of hybrid of American history, musicology and memoir. Whether discussing the prolific blaxploitation era, Sun Ra’s apocalyptic opus “Nuclear War,” or making a convincing argument for the musical virtuosity of the Police and Tears for Fears, “Music Is History” covers a lot of ground between its covers. By examining individual songs for their impact on American culture — and vice versa — Questlove argues that the nation itself comes with its own soundtrack. “It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that I think of the America we live in as a series of songs,” he writes. In his American soundtrack, Questlove includes Bill Withers’s 1972 Carnegie Hall performance of the brilliant and understated anti-Vietnam War song, “I Can’t Write Left-Handed,” and A Tribe Called Quest’s 2017 Grammy performance of its anti-Trump single, “We the People …” which he praises as not only “a searing reflection of what we were seeing in the headlines,” but a throwback to when musical artists of the ‘70s took a public stance on social and political issues.
As a world-famous artist and personality, Questlove recognizes that his role as a historian is a privilege, and with that privilege comes responsibility: to those without the means or platforms to tell their own stories, and to those who are taking time to listen to these stories. He writes how “much of the time, history gets told when people are permitted (or even invited) to tell it — in other words, when someone who is already interested in telling a story is charged with doing so.”
With “Music Is History,” however, Questlove is more curator than historian, more aficionado than analyst. He remains the inveterate music nerd, always quick to name-drop, share anecdotes and demonstrate the breadth of his incomparable knowledge. But as productive as he has been in recent years, and with such a consistent and sweeping output of work, even Questlove can’t help but occasionally repeat himself. The anecdote in “Music Is History” about President Barack Obama politely critiquing Questlove’s White House DJ set? He told that one in 2018’s “Creative Quest.” The moments in “Music Is History” where Questlove relates how Kurt Cobain’s suicide nearly derailed the Roots’ nascent career; about his early and misguided dismissal of D’Angelo as a generic R&B singer; about how he coped with the fear and confusion of 9/11 by purchasing a stack of CDs at New York’s Virgin Megastore? He covered all this in “Mo’ Meta Blues,” his first book.
As it happens with even the best storytellers, Questlove unfortunately — and one hopes unwittingly — at times plagiarizes his own work. Writing in “Music Is History” about the infamous 1995 Source Awards, Questlove remembers: “When Dr. Dre was announced as a nominee for Producer of the Year, people actually came to their feet. … Stood up in challenge, like they couldn’t wait for him to win just so they could cause trouble.” If this sounds familiar, it’s because this line appeared eight years ago in “Mo’ Meta Blues”: “When Dre was announced as a nominee for producer of the year, people stood up in challenge, like they couldn’t wait for him to win just so they could cause trouble.”
Notwithstanding these pardonable oversights, “Music Is History” is an entertaining, informative and far-reaching work, meticulously excavating American culture and history with the eye of a seasoned cratedigger. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a Questlove jawn without numerous song suggestions and music playlists with deep cuts that make it impossible to get through a chapter without putting the book down to listen to the obscure songs in question. In “Music Is History,” Questlove ultimately does what he has always done, what he does best: shares great music, tells great stories about musicians (many of whom he knows personally, as he doesn’t hesitate to mention), and serves as a sort of music ambassador, by encouraging an appreciation for the importance of songs. For Questlove, music is a reflection of society. As with politics, religion, fashion, culinary preferences and even history itself, musical taste is mostly subjective, but the more we open ourselves to different opinions, beliefs and, of course, music, the better citizens we will become.
“Go out and collect more facts, both those that support your conclusions and those that challenge them,” he writes. “Listen to the other side even as you protect your own side. Don’t close yourself off to new information, and don’t be afraid if that new information is eroding beliefs that give you comfort.”
Santi Elijah Holley is a journalist, essayist and the author of “Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads.”
Music Is History
By Questlove
Abrams Image. 352 pp. $29.99
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