Questlove | Soul Train
When Thompson was born, his pediatrician — an aspiring child psychologist — implored his parents to allow their child as much creative freedom as possible. Lee Andrews and Jacquelin Thompson were singers, and the doctor was curious to see whether their musicality would pass down to their newborn. From an early age, Thompson was encouraged to play in his food or draw on the walls. Luckily, he quickly took to the mess-free habit of banging on pots and pans. At age 5, he started drum lessons, which is to say he began tap-dancing lessons, learning the sort of rhythmic coordination that drumming demands. Eventually, he was allowed to touch the actual drums.
At the same time, he was receiving his own musical education from his family, who had a collection of almost 5,000 records. At age 4, Thompson was already schooled on the difference between Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” and the version by the Isley Brothers. His older sister liked mainstream rock (Queen, the Eagles); his mother grabbed any album with a cool cover (Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew”). His father liked rock, soul, folk — pretty much everything. Any albums he discarded went to Thompson; one of his first was Stevie Wonder’s outré “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants,” which, he has joked, was his version of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon.”
On The Summer of Soul:
The film’s true feat lies in Thompson’s restoration and contextualization. The difference between a concert like this and Woodstock is neither talent nor star power, but an enduring mythology that kept one rattling around in our head for decades after, while taking little notice of the other. Outside a handful of extremely popular artists, most Black soul, funk and R.&B. acts were denied the same serious study — obsessed over and scrutinized, the subjects of articles and films and books — as their white rock counterparts. Jazz was studied closely, but Black popular music, while not exactly ignored, seemed to be dismissed as faddish. It wasn’t until magazines like The Source, founded in 1988, and Vibe, in 1993, that we saw a well-read body of serious, published criticism of hip-hop and popular R.&B. By virtue of sampling, their ancestral genres were finally given some documented analysis, too.
Thompson’s work — maybe even Thompson himself — continues this corrective: using a music guy’s detailed scrutiny to ensure that Black music has its deserved place in the intellectual history. In his book “Music Is History,” Thompson mentions a clip he loved from an interview with Nina Simone, “where she talked about how Black people in America were, in one important respect, deprived of something that Africans had, and that was a sense of their own past.” A record is a culture’s lifeblood; remembrance is the first step toward being understood. This is where Thompson, a “Schoolhouse Rock!” episode of a man, shines. “I am also concerned (obsessed?) with looking at how the universe of music resolves into galaxies, and galaxies into constellations,” he writes. American music is connected to global music. Punk is a cousin of reggae. Rock and soul are related. “At some level, music is like one gigantic organism, flowing through people at different times, in different places.” He told me that he wants to “lay out the evidence before the people so that it’s not forgotten. And if they come to it and embrace it, perfect, but I’m very much aware and accepting of the fact that people move on.”
…Joseph Patel, a producer on the film and a longtime friend of Thompson’s, told me that Thompson approached “Summer of Soul” as a kind of corrective. If the festival didn’t get to be the stuff of legend for their generation, maybe it could be for the next. “He’s on this mission to tell these stories as sort of a larger restoration project of Black history, and to show that Black history is American history.” Thompson encourages us to imagine a world in which Black music history isn’t merely consumed but is venerated and treated like the cultural monument it is — like the way it already exists to him.
On DJing
His D.J. sets have been his primary venue for instruction for decades, showcasing the history of soul or funk or dance. He keeps lengthy playlists, organized by genre, theme, era and style, and refines them into the story he wants to tell, a duty he approaches with reverence. It can take him months to work on a playlist. Thompson referred to his relationship with D.J.ing as an embodied love, as if the activity has taken on a physical form and turned into a person who changes and ages and might get traded in. “I’ve been married to records for 50 years — is it time for a new chick?” he said. The days in which he can spend hours combing through his trove of records grow fewer. Then he reconsidered: “Well, I mean, I don’t feel like I’m cheating — it’s almost like if my spouse were to pass away. It’s run its course.”
Last month, he D.J.ed a party for Madonna. He started off with a thematic set — “I’m in a room that sort of looks like a modern update of ‘Paris Is Burning’; I just naturally thought, OK, this is a rare chance for me to play a really good house set” — but the reaction was muted. Then he played a set similar to the one I heard at Soho House, and people went wild, dancing and vogueing to T.I. “I’ve been busting my ass for 10, 20 years, trying to figure out the definitive house music to play for parties. If these songs didn’t work at a Madonna party. … ” He trailed off. I asked him about the discordance between his efforts of preservation and the ways people my age approach history. “I’m just trying to figure out if this is a transition I might not want to face.”
On Preserving Black History
Since “Summer of Soul” was released, he has become the owner of quite a bit of unsolicited music memorabilia. He has gotten truckloads of heirlooms, with the occasional accompanying note: I want to make sure that you have these artifacts because I know you’ll know what to do with them after I’m gone. The first night we met, he showed me a mint-condition bread bag, a strange piece of merchandising that the Supremes had done in 1966. A jazz station in West Virginia gave him its library, some 30,000 records. This summer, a collector in Minnesota gave him 800 hours of tapes showcasing the history of Black radio. He understands why these things get sent to him. “Who would care about this as much as I do?” he said.
These histories either go to him or end up in the trash, so he takes them all, describing himself as a “walking Blacksonian,” preserving them as best he can. The actual Blacksonian, or the National Museum of African American History and Culture, has approached him about housing his collection after he dies. It’s an offer he’s still considering.
The objects tell a story, and their preservation asserts that there’s a story worth telling. Over and over, his friends told me that Thompson’s prolificness wasn’t his most impressive feature; it’s that he never stopped being a fan. “Somebody’s gonna have to do a term paper in 2050,” he told me, “and I just want to make sure they’ve got their information right.”
