INTRODUCTION
I am writing from the summer of 2023, the year that has been officially designated as the fiftieth anniversary of hip-hop.
The designation stems from the date, mythic but also real, of an August 11, 1973, back-to-school party in the Bronx, held in the rec room of an apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, planned by a Jamaican-born teen named Cindy Campbell (she made the decorations and made up a pricing structure—a quarter for girls for admission, fifty cents for boys, and concessions that included seventy-five-cent hot dogs) and featuring Cindy’s older brother Clive, nicknamed “Kool Herc” as a result of his imposing physical stature (“Herc” was short for “Hercules”), furnishing entertainment that consisted of a DJ set in which he spun funk records using a novel technique that foregrounded the beats (or breakbeats), isolating them and repeating them in ways that not only provided a new space for dancers (or breakdancers) but also constructed a frame over which Herc could stretch extended raps or commentaries.
I have my quibbles with picking this date as a birth date, for reasons I will explain, but no one can question the fact of hip-hop’s birth, because no one can question what followed: decades of innovation, achievement, energy, artistry, and history, meaning decades of life. History is never simple. It’s layers upon layers. But what exactly is this miraculous, mercurial genre that has given so much to me and so many other artists, and to which we are trying in turn to give something back?
Big question. Long answer to follow.
* * *
The story begins just after Thanksgiving of 2022, leftover turkey still in the refrigerator. My manager Shawn Gee and the television producers Jesse Collins and Dionne Harmon came to me. They had a question: “The Grammys want to do something for Hip-Hop 50. Would you lead it? How do you feel about putting something together?”
I am the king of “yes,” and the victim of it, too. Out of muscle memory and habit I agree to a job before I think about what it actually involves, what I’m getting myself into, and what I might need to get myself out of. “Of course,” I said. “No problem whatsoever. I can do this in my sleep.”
But sleep was exactly what didn’t happen. I got right to work trying to tell the story of the genre, first by building playlists and sourcing history. I knew I would need headliners, big artists, and I would also need important artists who might not have sold quite as much, not to mention artists of the moment. That meant Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Public Enemy, Drake, Griselda, Cardi B, Coi Leray, Coast Contra, Jack Harlow, Meek Mill, and all points in between. About five hours into the sourcing, it felt daunting, but with a window of possibility. About ten hours into the sourcing, I realized that the segment—whatever it ended up being—had to have a time limit, and that this fact created a second fact, which was that I would have to demote some artists and cut others out. I would have to make hard choices and play favorites. This whole thing, which had the potential to be a landmark event, could also result in angry faces in a ring around me. Was I being set up for failure? Instantly, I felt a twinge of regret for having said yes.
In truth, it was an accumulated twinge. I had, the previous March, won the Oscar for directing Summer of Soul, a documentary about the Harlem Cultural Festival, also known as the Black Woodstock. I created the movie in a relatively calm atmosphere that was ironically enabled by the broad international crisis of pandemic. I was doing different things, living upstate, sketching on weekend mornings, getting further into meditation. But in the wake of the Oscar, I was also in demand. People were seeking me out to direct more movies. I said yes to one offer and yes to a second, and before I knew it I was down for a half dozen commitments. I remember a conversation with my ex-girlfriend, one of the last ones before we broke up. She was dismayed. “You learned absolutely nothing in the last two years,” she said. “You told me that the less work you do and the more time you have to breathe, the more the stars aligned. You were working only on the things you wanted, and that felt good.”
“Right,” I said.
“So what’s with all the new work?” she said. “You basically just regressed. You relapsed the way a drug addict would. Pandemic was calm in a way but when real life came back you went right back to hiding in your work.” She started to say something else but stopped. What she said instead was devastating. “I guess you’ll have space and time for this relationship in, like, 2032.”
Then and there, I told myself I would never again agree to do anything without taking time to assess it first, to see what the time-management landscape looked like, to think about who other than myself might be affected.
But she was right to tell me that I was wrong, and I was wrong to think that I would listen to myself, and here I was having committed to a Hip-Hop 50 Grammy tribute that had the potential to burn a bunch of bridges while I was standing on them. One of the bridges that it started to burn was the relationship itself. The 2032 estimate now looked optimistic. That relationship, which had spanned the pandemic, started to end, and I did what she knew I’d do all along. I moved forward into more work. Specifically, I started on the Grammy tribute project. I made a demo. I put together an audio map of the hip-hop genre over the half century from 1973, going from the earliest Bronx DJing to Jimmy Castor to “Apache” and moving through all of it, every song and artist I loved, all the ones I listed above and all the ones I didn’t, until I got to GloRilla or Ice Spice or whoever I thought best represented 2023. I made what I thought were all the hard choices. By the time I was finished, it was thirty-three minutes and forty-two seconds. I knew that the Grammys weren’t going to give me that much time but maybe I could get close. I called Jesse and Dionne and asked them how long I would have.
“Ten minutes,” they said. “Maybe eleven.”
I thought they were joking. I was sure they were joking. How could anyone pare down the entire half century to a segment that short? On top of everything else it would require me to deliver disappointment to artists, telling some that I could use only a snippet of their greatest songs, telling others that I couldn’t use them at all. And what about the artists who were no longer sharp performers, or who I knew wouldn’t be warmly received on TV or social media? Would I have to write them out of history entirely? That’s when it hit me: they had suckered me into being the bad cop!!! “Is that why you came to me? To make me the bad cop?!?!”
They started laughing. But the laughing didn’t last that long. “These things that you’re bringing up,” they said, “sound like YPs instead of OPs.” Meaning: your problem, instead of our problem.
A day later I called Dionne back. I had worked with her on the Oscars when I was the de facto orchestra and a quasi host. I gave her a level-with-me talk. “Even though I’m a creative I am also a suit,” I said. “So don’t shield me like I’m an artist. Tell me the truth. How much time do I really have?”
“Ten to eleven,” she said.
“Come on,” I said. “You can tell me.”
“I am telling you,” she said. “There are other parts of this celebration. We’re going to give Dr. Dre an award. You have ten to eleven minutes for your segment.”
Jesse and Dionne are the Ashford and Simpson of production. I know when to go to Dad for some things and Mom for some other things. I rolled out my appeal. “Dionne,” I said, “I need you to come through for me. You gotta find me five more minutes. Can you give another segment a haircut?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
She called me back the next morning. “I’ve got good news and—”
“You didn’t say bad news,” I said.
“I got you more time,” she said.
“How much? Seventeen? Sixteen? Eighteen?”
“You have thirteen minutes,” she said. She delivered the news like she had gone out and gotten venison that was going to feed the household for a month. It was spoken in triumph and a kind of finality.
In the wake of that call, I thought about reindeer games. I always do. It’s one of the metaphors I have used more than almost any other. The Roots, since our inception, often felt that hip-hop was a party and we were invited late or not at all. We didn’t get to participate in everything that it had to offer, even though we had the talent and the desire. Gatekeepers turned us away for one reason or another: not perceived as hard enough, not making the right kinds of hits at the right time. Being Rudolph came to be my skeleton key for everything. In this situation, though, I wasn’t Rudolph. I was Santa. I was the gatekeeper.
* * *
The first challenge was to see who I could entice to participate. A tribute is a strange beast. Each artist gets only a little time onstage, and no artist feels like he or she has any real time in the spotlight. Given that, how do you make a pitch to any artist to give up a workday for two or three bars or even three words? Not to mention how would I figure out for myself who to include and who to leave off my wish list? The way I wanted to do the tribute was chronological, which eliminated some of the ego, but not all of it, in part because there was so much of it.
Shawn Gee had a thought early on. “This is what you do,” he said. “You represent one demographic. You pick one New York god, one LA god, one Midwest god, one from Atlanta, one from Texas.” Easier said than done. Who was New York? Was it Big Daddy Kane? Was it KRS-One? Rakim? I did at least a week and a half of distilling and got it down to a fair and decent representation. Then the asks went out. Lots of people were instant no, right out of the gate. Some of it I understood. They were on tour already, or were on a movie set. And there were more than a few fuck-the-Grammys nos as well. The amount of bridge-burning that rappers feel the Grammys have done to them over the years creates and extends that idea. I got it, at some level—the respect hasn’t always been there from the Academy—but if I got that call I would have been like Sonny the Cuckoo from the Cocoa Puffs commercial.
Even when I understood the demurrals, I didn’t necessarily accept them. I worked on people. To teach myself, I pulled up the We Are the World documentary (the original, not the “Al Jarreau is a crazy mofo” version) and watched it twice to see how Quincy Jones operated. What were the words he used? What was his tone? He reprimanded some of the stars, went rough on others, brought people together. I started to adopt Quincy’s language. I broke out, “We’re coming together for the culture,” and, “Let’s check our egos at the door.” There was a broader argument, too, the one that I made in Things Fall Apart and Summer of Soul, which was that we don’t want a disposable Black culture. We don’t want everything we made to fall by the wayside.
None of it worked. As a matter of fact, I had even more drama on my hands. The process of inviting groups started to work—or not work—the way that the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame worked. Lots of these groups hadn’t been groups for decades. Some hadn’t been in each other’s presence that long. And in some cases, the original group’s name had been transferred to members who hadn’t been part of the original picture. That was another can of whoop-ass that had the potential to be opened right on my head. I was reporting hourly to the Grammy group thread, telling them that in addition to working out production and song choice, we were juggling dozens of egos. I made two requests: first, that we were going to need extra security, not just because of beef between rappers but because of beef within groups; and second, that we were going to need a life coach to talk people off the ledge.
* * *
And there were ledges. I almost climbed onto one myself when I heard the news, a few weeks after I started putting out asks, that LL Cool J was moving forward with his own version of a fiftieth anniversary tribute. His genesis was almost comically straightforward. He was at a party and had a conversation with the president of CBS, who brought up the concept, sparked to the idea of LL running it, and told him to have a good evening. It was like the movie Boomerang, where Lady Eloise (played by Eartha Kitt) runs her cosmetics empire without exactly running the company. At the top tier, wishes are articulated, but no plans are put in place. I heard a little bit about the LL version, but I figured that it would dissipate, which is why I was unprepared when Jesse called together the entire team for an announcement: “Guys, we have a situation on their hands,” he said. “Apparently, LL Cool J has been promised that it would be his segment.” Moans and groans all around. “We kind of have to share the moment with him.”
The news landed on me like a brick. I was already dealing with the headache of how to chop my half hour down to thirteen minutes, and here was a new element (LLement?). It was explained to us that LL was willing to work together, but I knew him, and knew what kind of strong alpha figure he was. What flashed into my head was a quote from Friday: “It’s just like it’s both ours.” My first thought was to text Shawn to tell him it wasn’t going to work, that I needed to drop out. But my baby/bathwater instincts got to me. I don’t like throwing away work that’s already done. And when I reached out to LL, he didn’t make an alpha move. Instead he was gracious enough to hit me right back and ask after my thoughts. I gave him my mix. “This is great,” he said. “Let’s roll with this.”
* * *
Meanwhile, actual negotiations were still in progress. Sometimes I was going to the artists, other times assistants or managers. I had never seen a world so built on defense. What I mean by that is that during a week of conversations, I never saw a single proactive creative decision made. Rather, everything was a reaction to someone else’s decision. “Who all going to be there?” was the most common question I heard. I knew why: they wanted me to make adjustments to remove the people they found unsavory. I tried to accommodate. I went back to Mom and Dad. We made calls to management or label heads. Sometimes we managed to get the water under the bridge. Sometimes we had to push people out to keep someone else’s peace. That was just the seating arrangements, the way you’d work out a wedding between two warring families. Then there were secondary questions: “How many dancers does blah blah blah have?” I should have said, “I signed an NDA and I can’t say.” But my naive ass answered, and that led directly to games of chicken, hints that maybe an artist wouldn’t show up. It was like a scene from an 80s action movie where the hero had to solve a Rubik’s Cube before the building exploded. I did, barely, just in time for rehearsals. My partner in music direction for the event, Jazzy Jeff, worked with me to get the band ready for the medley, first in Electric Lady in New York. Then we went west to SIR Studios in Los Angeles. We had four days to go.
Much of rehearsals was just as fun as you would expect. LL Cool J and Run are storytelling geniuses, and they showed it off regularly. They could have a Prairie Home Companion of hip-hop folklore. Just one example: LL named Chung King Studios. It used to be John King Studios, but there was a dope Chinese restaurant around the corner. One day LL looked up from his take-out carton. “You should call this place Chung King,” he said. “I only come here because of the food.”
But that didn’t mean that it went smoothly. The four-day rush to the Grammys was cut in half by logistics, meaning that we spent two full days mapping out entrances and exits for vocalists, making sure that Eighties Rapper X didn’t run into her nemesis on the way out of the building. We had two artists drop out because of COVID and another with a family issue. We had stuck-in-their-ways rappers who resisted in-ear monitors, which made it impossible for them to hear as I counted in the track. And then we had one particular artist who we were sure had sent a body double. This performer showed up in a full-face mask and sunglasses. Me and Jeff wondered if it was really who it was supposed to be. “I’m going to go and find out,” I said.
The security guard stopped me. “Nah,” he said.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Questlove. I’m the musical director of the event.”
“I know who you are,” he said.
“I just want to powwow,” I said. “I talked to the manager, the assistant. But not once to the actual artist.”
The security guard took a beat. “Yeah,” he said. “Nah. That can’t happen.” All the while, the artist is there in the back corner of the room, hoodie, sunglasses. To this day I am still not sure whether we got the real artist or a hired double.
* * *
Suddenly it was game time. Grammy night. First Lady Jill Biden was a presenter at the awards, and any time you have someone presidential, whether White House or White House–adjacent, you have to go through a certain level of sweeping just to get in the building. Historically speaking, rappers and metal detectors are not good friends. Off the top of my head, I can think of at least four acts that have had crippling things happen to their careers because of metal detectors. Working out that whole mess was endless. It exhausted me, but it also gave me one of the greatest laughs of my life, when Stro Elliot turned to me and said, “We’ve seen this before”—pause—“30 Rock.” He was talking about the episode where Liz Lemon briefly dates a conservative Black guy, decides she doesn’t like him, and tries to tank the relationship by bringing him to the Source Awards, where she thinks she can prove both that she is not racist and that he is unpleasant. Everything that happened in that episode happened on Grammy night, but it wasn’t on my mind until Stro mentioned it. Even thinking about it now gets me laughing. Thank you, Stro.
The last rapper cleared security. I finally made it to relaxation. I could rest for a bit, put clothes on, walk the red carpet, tell a joke to Taylor Swift, and go to my table, where I was sitting with Jazzy Jeff, Shawn, Tariq, his wife Michelle, some others. I wanted to just chill out and see Bad Bunny, who was opening the show with performances of “El Apagón” and “Después de la Playa.” The second I leaned back in my seat, my phone buzzed. I looked at Shawn to see that he was going for his phone, too. Both of us had gotten Code Red texts that we needed to report to the directors’ booth all-caps-and-nine-exclamation-points IMMEDIATELY!!!!!!!!!
Shawn got up and went. But I couldn’t move. It wasn’t because of fatigue. It was because of where I was sitting. Bad Bunny wasn’t performing onstage per se. The way the tables were set up, he was playing in the space between the tables. I was in the camera’s eyeline. They sent a crew guy out to me, and Jesse started guiding him, like Ving Rhames in Mission: Impossible. “Weave around camera fourteen. Go behind Beyoncé, quick. Now bend down.” It took seven minutes to join Shawn and Jesse in the booth.
“What’s the emergency?” I said.
“Well,” one of the Grammy guys said. The way he said it, I knew that it was bad news. “One of your acts is already en route home. He felt disrespected because one of the security people disrespected someone in his party.”
“Let me talk to them.”
“You’re not hearing me,” the guy said. “He’s en route.”
My brain was catching up, slowly. “What exactly happened?”
Evidently this said rapper was late getting to his table, and he got caught in the Bad Bunny sight line cross fire. A security guard stopped him with a hand. “You can’t be roaming like this,” he told the rapper. Somehow the guard’s hand also found its way into the vicinity of the rapper’s girlfriend’s breasts. Groping was alleged. “Fuck this,” the rapper said, and left.
Copyright © 2024 by Ahmir Khalib Thompson
