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?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
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