I do love a hoodie,� Questlove says, stepping into the Hoodie Shop on Orchard Street from a light afternoon rain. The Roots drummer and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon bandleader (real name: Ahmir Thompson) is an old friend of the shop’s co-founder, Peter Shapiro, who owns the Brooklyn Bowl, where Quest spins on Thursdays. Soon he’ll D.J. here, too�there’s even a booth built to suit him. �I have a love affair with hoodies that goes way back,� he continues, checking the price tag on a plain yellow option. �When Tariq [Trotter, the Roots’ M.C.] and I first saw the Tribe Called Quest video for �Can I Kick It?’ and they were all wearing hoodies, I was like, �Yo, we gotta go to the Gap and get that.’ That’s when I purchased my first bona fide hoodie.� In a slightly macabre coincidence, the Hoodie Shop, which sells only hooded clothing, opened on Tuesday, March 20, the day before thousands of people gathered in Union Square for the �Million Hoodie March� to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin, the unarmed black 17-year-old gunned down February 26 in Sanford, Florida, while�and perhaps because�he was wearing a hoodie.
Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, hasn’t been charged, and since the story went national last week, the hoodie has become a kind of rallying cry for justice�worn in protest by news anchors, the Miami Heat, several New York State assemblymen, and Congressman Bobby Rush, who was kicked off the House floor Wednesday for it. �I texted Pete and said how ironic is it that we’re going into this Hoodie Shop venture now, with what’s happened,� Questlove says. He’s sans hoodie today, wearing a black corduroy blazer over a black T-shirt. His hair, usually picked into a frizzy penumbra for public appearances, is braided tightly against his head. �I was like, �How we gonna handle this, because I don’t want people to think we’re jumping on the hoodie bandwagon.’ � The Hoodie Store has been in the works for a year, Shapiro says, the spring opening planned for months. But if the timing seems freighted, Questlove is willing to roll with it. As he sees it, the broader hoodie moment has been a long time coming.
�Fashion-wise, for the skinny-jean generation, we’re undergoing the first significant comeback of the hoodie since those Gap hoodies back in the early nineties. I never even thought about it as something a scary dude wears. When I think of someone trying to rob you, I think of a ski mask. Now would I walk around wearing a ski mask? That wouldn’t do me much good.� It’s hard to imagine Questlove ever seeming menacing. If anything, he’s getting a little cuddlier now that he’s over 40, despite being nearly six weeks into what he calls �a great vegan experiment.� �I want to be the first member of the hip-hop generation to live past 60.� A middle-class Philadelphia native, Quest helped form the Roots in the late eighties, rode a wave of funky multidimensional hip-hop, released thirteen albums, and commuted from Philly to New York for Late Night tapings until he finally got a crash pad in the financial district. He’s also been spending a lot of time in the �I found a company in Brooklyn called Dee and Ricky,� he says.
�They make these brooches out of Legos, and they gave Kanye and me the very first ones. It’s a heart made out of Legos. As of lately, I’ve been rocking my nondescript blank hoodies with my Lego heart piece. It’s a great conversation piece.� He pauses as a customer comes in and snaps a picture of him. �And you know, to the people I meet it’s probably one of the most peaceful-�looking hoodies in existence.� The Who’s �Tommy� comes up on the shop’s large video screen, and Quest steps back out onto Orchard Street and gets reflective. �The difference between this situation with Trayvon Martin and Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell and any other unarmed guy who got killed is that this time, there’s a fashion accessory associated with it.� He calls �the hoodie thing� a ��distraction � to keep eyes off the �issue of race relations in America. Whatever the hoodies’ new symbolism, Questlove is not going to let it change his habits, he tells me as he strides slowly down the street in the light rain toward a new Scion parked nearby.
�Because the hoodie and braiding my hair are what literally makes my Saturday: I’m getting my hair braided, I put my �favorite plain hoodie on, and that gets me a great two minutes alone before someone recognizes me. And I need that time. And I need that hoodie.�Shally S JewelryLego JewelryJewelry EarringsJewelry IdeasLego CraftsDyi CraftsLego DiyUnending CraftJewelry ManufacturingForwardThese 3 in1 lego earrings are packed together with other two colour cubes, easy way to get different colour combinations.Questlove MusicianBeard QuestloveQuestlove RootsThompson QuestloveQuestlove AhmirPhotography HiphopDrummer PhotographyArt PhotographyBlackandwhite PhotographyForwardThe famous drummer Questlove from the legendairy band the Roots. Pictured with his iconic afro and comb.Questlove was a sputtering, nervous mess when he first met his idol, Prince. Q-Tip introduced Quest to Prince at a nightclub in downtown NYC, but the drummer was more than a bit stunned when he realized his idol knew who he was:
Words, finally, appeared in the gurgling. “Just that…you are…knowing who I…be.”“He’s amazed that you know he’s alive.”“That you be knowing me. That, I, I mean you, I mean. That the thing is.” At this point, Q-Tip shot me a glance. It was the look you give a guy in a plane when it’s going down. Time to hit the silk. “I’m going to go,” I said, and I went. After his parents threw away (and even broke!) his records from artists they thought were inappropriate — Prince, The Time, Vanity 6 — Questlove recorded them onto cassettes and hid them inside his drums. Hearing D’Angelo for the first time changed Questlove’s life. He was frustrated with what R&B had turned into, lacking “authentic passion” and “soulless.” But then he heard D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar: It changed my life. Here was a singer who connected with me as deeply as the best hip-hop. It was the first album, of course, the sensibility that powered the songs, the ability to locate the heart of the best soul music.
It was out of step with the times but in a way that made it seem like he was stepping into uncharted territory. But he had actually passed up the chance to work with him! After being offered to play on the song “Shit, Damn, Motherfucker,” Quest passed, having sized up D’Angelo previously when he’d come by the studio, thinking “eh, another corny R&B guy.” “I had no clue that he was going to be the second coming,” he writes. The Roots’ residency on Jimmy Fallon is the direct result of a human pyramid. The drummer had initially been set on declining Jimmy Fallon’s invitation to have The Roots become his house band. But after he invited Fallon to one of their shows, that all changed. Fallon had been hanging backstage, and after just ten minutes, Questlove came back from an interview and saw something he never thought he’d see: Jimmy “with almost the whole band — Tariq, Tuba, Owen, Frank, Kamal, and others — making a huge human pyramid.” The group was laughing;
in general, the band had been enjoying themselves and having more fun those days. “Jimmy brought all of that to a boil, in the best sense,” Questlove writes, “and I couldn’t help but laugh at how silly they all looked. Oh, shit, I thought to myself. We’re stuck with this guy, aren’t we?” Kanye West’s performance of “Jesus Walks” for Dave Chappelle’s Block Party was the moment Questlove felt a changing of the guard. We were shooting a performance of “Jesus Walks,” and Kanye wanted to come in with a marching band. I remember a welter of political and artistic thoughts crowding my mind. I thought about how presidential he looked and how the black kids were responding to him, something I had ever really focused on in our own audience. I remember having a kind of out-of-body experience and investigation of the thought of my own artistic death. “Am I dead already?” I remember […] thinking to myself, “Oh, I see. This is where I get off.” I saw the rest of the plot stretched out before me.
Kanye was going to be the new leader, and I was fine with that. According to Quest, the single most influential moment in the history of hip-hop was the Stevie Wonder episode of the Cosby Show. “Why do I say that this episode changed hip-hop forever?” “Simple: it was the first time that 99 percent of us who went on to be hip-hop producers saw what a sampler was.” He marks that as the moment he got sucked into hip-hop production; it was the first time he’d seen a sampler, just as it was the first time for so many other legendary producers, like J Dilla and Just Blaze. But they weren’t sure of exactly what it was. At that point, it was just something cool on a sitcom, and in response to it, in awe of it, an entire generation of talented, ambitious black kids leaned forward in their chairs to the point of falling out. He was initially hesitant to work with Jay-Z because he felt he was the “antichrist to a certain kind of hip-hop fan.” When The Roots were offered the chance to be Jay-Z’s backing band for his MTV Unplugged performance, Questlove admits that he was initially skeptical, even though he was a fan: “Admiring him was one thing — but collaborating with him?
That seemed like it could be a real train-wreck of cultural signifiers: his big-money, above-the-title hip-hop, our legit indie reputation.” But after working together on Unplugged, he discovered that Jay turned out to be one of the “easiest people to work with” that he’s ever encountered. They were two music nerd peas in a pod. The Roots began, as most bands do, in part to impress a girl. Amel Larrieux was the “beautiful, kind” girl in high school (who later became a star herself, in a group called Groove Theory), and 18-year-old Questlove wanted to impress her. So, naturally, he told her he was performing with his then-acquaintance, Tariq, at the talent show, even though they had nothing planned. Luckily, they gathered up a band made up jazz kids and experimentalists, and that marked the pair’s first live performance, where Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter performed as Radio Activity. And he later took Amel to the prom.