Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a timekeeper by career. As a drummer, he is the co-frontman of the Grammy-winning hip-hop band The Roots. He’s additionally a historian, an writer of books and a maker of movies that illuminate the methods through which music is formed by time and tradition, and shapes it in flip. So his relationship to time exists very a lot within the current — as a creator of rhythmic construction, controller of tempo and catalyst of power — but additionally prior to now, as every drumstroke recedes instantly into the echoes of historical past.
Questlove’s directorial debut, Summer season of Soul, gained the Academy Award for finest documentary characteristic in 2022; his newest movie, Sly Lives!, is a masterful portrait of the legendary funk innovator Sly Stone. There is a second in that documentary when a younger Maria Shriver, in footage from a 1982 interview, asks Sly concerning the songs he wrote within the late ’60s, when, in her phrases: “Nearly every part on this nation was in disarray.” She asks him: “Did that make your job as a musician harder, or simpler?” With out lacking a beat, Sly solutions: “Simpler! These are the sorts of issues that make you are feeling like working and writing, enjoying, doing what you do — actually attempting to say one thing.”
These phrases made me pause and rewind a number of instances. As a result of nowadays, disarray is a situation remodeling the lives and work of artists around the globe. It was stunning to me that Sly’s reply was so assured and clear, whereas we’re grappling with such confusion about navigating the chaos of our personal time. There could also be many the explanation why response and resistance in 2025 pose totally different challenges than in 1968. But in addition, I understand, Sly’s reply got here with the advantage of hindsight. Perhaps it was solely by trying again throughout the years that he might perceive what it had meant to bear creative witness to such upheaval.
My dialog with Questlove saved circling again to at least one unchanging reality: Time strikes so shortly. As we stroll via this life, our skill to understand the contours of the current that surrounds and generally overwhelms us is restricted. It is solely by trying backwards that we will see the place we have been and the place we have been going, and perceive what we have been doing and what we have been attempting to say.
