Music Book Review: Music is History by Questlove

Music is History
by Questlove (Music 781.6 Que)

History books are one of the most prevalent components of any music library, and I think they’re essential to digging into the background of all kinds of styles and eras in music. It’s true, though, that many of them can be fairly formulaic and not that far removed stylistically from the history books you may remember from high school. However, there are definitely books that try to get out of that box and approach the subject from unique angles, and one recent arrival on the Polley shelves is a great example of that. It’s called Music is History, and it’s written by musician, producer, DJ, and author Questlove. This is his fourth book, and his approach to the last 50 years of pop music is truly unique and makes for a fast and riveting read.

 

If you’re not familiar with Questlove, besides being an amazing drummer, producer, and leader of The Roots, he has been active as a DJ and is a massive record collector, not to mention his recent debut as film director for Summer of Soul. He’s been an avid listener all of his life, and with this book, he’s combining his voluminous knowledge of records with the history of the last 50 years, which coincides with his own birth. You’ll find a little bit of more personal reflection included in Music is History, but it’s not a memoir — the personal tidbits are there to help connect music and the musicians involved with making it back to the years or eras in which it was made. If you do want to read Questlove’s memoir, though, check out his first book, Mo Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove, which you can borrow from Polley. And his other two books, Creative Quest and Somethingtofoodabout, are both available from Lincoln City Libraries.

 

In his introduction, Questlove describes what he means by “history” in this book: we all have our favorite songs. Especially think of those songs from youth that remind us of particular places, times, and people after hearing just a few seconds of them. Now imagine a professional musician who has been listening hard his entire life, making decades of such associations in his mind, and further connecting them with the big sociopolitical trends happening in society at the time these songs debuted. Then think of the process of what he calls “building bridges between songs,” connecting how those same kinds of trends in the human experience repeat themselves, creating chains of associations across eras, and now we’re getting into the kind of history that Questlove is presenting here. While it all necessarily comes through his own personal filter, as opposed to a researched academic kind of history, he establishes the same kinds of links between music and culture that a conventional history book highlights, but has more fun doing it. I love the general form of this book, and I love the extemporaneous side thoughts that sometimes naturally enter into the conversation.

 

In terms of form, the book proceeds year by year starting in 1971. Each year starts with a highlight of various political and cultural highlights of the year, followed by a few pages of Questlove’s reminiscences around relevant songs from that year. And some years get into really interesting discussions that you just don’t see in a lot of music history books. Already in the 1972 chapter, for example, Questlove launches into the significance of Blaxploitation films like Super Fly and Shaft, and how the music created for these films helped to set the tone for so much music in the 70s, with further focus into Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack and then even further into the tune “Freddie’s Dead,” and its message of cycles that seem to repeat forever. We’ll see many variations on these repeating themes in music of the last 50 years throughout the book, and Questlove often takes a moment to stretch them from their origin year into other songs with similar messages in later years. Bill Wither’s tune “I Can’t Write Left-Handed” from 1973, for example, resonates well with Public Enemy’s “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” and Pharcyde’s “Officer.”

 

Some of Questlove’s favorite artists seem to be obvious by virtue of how many of their songs get referenced in the book: Prince, Public Enemy, Stevie Wonder, Sly & the Family Stone, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown all get lots of mentions among a giant list of artists. This ends up being quite effective, though, as these are great examples of artists whose work resonated over many decades, always finding new relevance with new times. And that’s the great thing about growing with your favorite artists, too. We all navigate through the challenges, ebbs and flows of life together, in a sense, and that relationship with the music becomes richer and more nuanced. When it comes to relatively short spans of time like Questlove is addressing here, history and general fandom definitely inform one another as we all live through an historical era or two ourselves.

 

The general pattern of the book remains the same until we reach the year 2002, at which point we just get one more chapter addressing that era to the present. Questlove reflects on 9/11 as a major turning point in history, and other than looking at the immediately ensuing years as a kind of post-9/11 recovery period, it’s a little too soon to make “historical” judgements about the years closest to our own. Interestingly, he wrote the final touches to this final chapter of the book just as the COVID-19 pandemic raged throughout the world and the January 6 attacks took place in the United States. With so many seemingly important events happening so close together, it is indeed difficult to predict what the most significant events of this moment will look like 20 years from now. But hopefully we’ll all have our own musical soundtracks of these times to help us remember.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Mo Meta Blues: The World According to Questlove by Questlove or Music: A Subversive History by Ted Giola.)

 

( Wikipedia page for Questlove ) ( official Questlove web site – also official site for the book )

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

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Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!