1.Wrong


Twenty years before the Roots became the house band for NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2014—placing them at the epicenter of the American cultural mainstream—they were an obscure hip-hop act promoting their first album on the road, opening for only slightly less obscure hip-hop acts.

The Roots’ twenty-three-year-old drummer, Ahmir Thompson, was their de facto leader, with his trademark afro their de facto logo. The world would later come to know him as Questlove. But on this evening in 1994, outside a small North Carolina venue, he was an unknown.

After the Roots’ performance, Questlove settled into a car, en route to an interview at a nearby college radio station, while the headliners, the Pharcyde, took the stage for their set. As the beats from the club drifted out into the parking lot, Questlove asked the driver to wait. He rolled down the window to listen. Something in the drums sounded … wrong.

* * *

What was Questlove expecting to hear? What all who listen to popular music expect: a steady beat.

One sound—whether the bang of a drum or a note struck on a piano or a bird’s chirp—doesn’t become music until a second sound occurs; either at the same time, called harmony; or at another moment in time, called melody; the ordered spacing of those sounds in time called rhythm.

Thus all music begins with the second event. The indivisible number of rhythm is two, for it is the space between the first and second beat that sets our musical expectations and tells us when to expect the third, and so on.

The common rhythm of our popular music is counted in multiples of either two or three. Most often, we count in “measures” or “bars” of fours: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. But in that rhythm, the back-and-forth of the one and two stays well defined. In modern popular music, we tend to stomp our feet on beats one and three (the downbeat), and clap our hands on beats two and four (the backbeat). So it sounds something like this: STOMP-clap!-STOMP-clap!

TRY IT YOURSELF: A STEADY BEAT

Outside that North Carolina nightclub, what Questlove heard was different. The claps, which should have carried that steady backbeat, slid into place just slightly after he expected to hear them. Each clap sounded like a book falling down onto its side just after being set upright on a shelf. The weirdest part was the kick: the drum sound played with the foot to carry that “stomping” downbeat. The kick drum was chaotic. It would appear on the “one” and then not show up when he expected it to hit on the “three.” Instead, it would pop into view in irregular places, not places that felt familiar or safe to a drummer, the musician most responsible for delivering a stable, dependable pulse. He’d never heard a drumbeat so inconsistent in a rap song, a genre of music made on machines, all with dependable digital clocks. It sounded, as Questlove would later describe in colorful language, like what would happen if you gave a baby two tequila shots, placed her in front of a drum machine, and had her try to program a beat. Nothing was exactly where he expected it to be. And that’s what made it exhilarating.

Questlove ran to the stage door. After convincing the security guards that he was, in fact, one of the musicians, he stood backstage and listened to the song. The next day he asked his tourmates: What was that first song y’all did where the kick drum was all over the place?

That was “Bullshit,” they answered, one of the songs from their new album. Produced by that kid we told you about, Jay Dee.

Questlove flashed back to his conversation a couple of weeks prior with the four members of the Pharcyde backstage at Irving Plaza in New York, when he told them how excited he was that Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest—one of the most popular and creative groups in hip-hop and Questlove’s musical “North Star”—was going to be producing tracks for their upcoming album. Not Q-Tip, they replied. Tip’s boy from Detroit. They pointed to a rather unremarkable-looking young man sitting on a couch nearby. And Questlove recalled being disappointed, and rather disinterested in meeting whoever it was.

Now he was interested.

* * *

The next year, the recording engineer Bob Power sat behind a mixing board in New York’s Battery Studios during a recording session for the fourth album from A Tribe Called Quest. Power was middle-aged, Jewish, a trained musician who had forged an unlikely creative partnership with the three Black kids from Queens since the beginning of their careers. They gave him a crucial education in the methodology of hip-hop beatmaking. And the members of Tribe, in turn, found in Power a trusted ear, a sound man who helped them combine disparate sampled sounds from dozens of different records into seamless songs, and could navigate the tangled terrain of electronic music production, coaxing different machines with different clocks to synchronize with each other.

Power had developed a rhythm with the group’s two producers, the lead vocalist, Jonathan Davis, who performed under the name Q-Tip, and the DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Power knew what to expect from them and they shared a language to communicate musical ideas. But that dynamic changed on this album with the addition of another, outside producer. Some new kid Q-Tip found in Detroit named Jay Dee.

Power listened to one of Jay Dee’s tracks for a song called “Word Play” as he recorded those sounds from a digital drum machine onto a huge, two-inch-wide reel of magnetic tape able to hold twenty-four separate tracks of audio at once.

Power squinted. Something sounded wrong.

The drums were … weird. The snare drum on the backbeat landed a little off, but the kick drum just bounced all over the place. The whole thing sounded sloppy, like the kid didn’t even care where the drums fell. Like he didn’t really have much musical or technical knowledge.

Power wanted to say something, but he knew he couldn’t. Q-Tip and the guys in the crew seemed to be keen on Jay Dee, and Power was always wary of overstepping his bounds. So he held his tongue.

But Power thought: Man, this shit is fucked up.

Later it occurred to Bob Power that maybe that was the whole point.

* * *

In 1997, at another recording studio in New York City, the singer D’Angelo assembled a band to record his second album. In addition to Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson on drums, there were James Poyser on keyboards and Roy Hargrove on horns. The odd man out in this crew of young Americans was the London-based bassist Pino Palladino.

Palladino had started his career in the 1970s and worked as an in-demand studio and stage player for most of the eighties and nineties with artists like Eric Clapton, Elton John, Melissa Etheridge, and Phil Collins. But in all his years as a professional sideman, Palladino had never quite played the way D’Angelo was now asking him to do. “D” wanted Palladino to place his notes far behind the beat, meaning that Palladino’s bass notes would drop just after the listener expected to hear them. Palladino understood this as a technique from jazz, backphrasing. But what was different here was how severe it was and how it deliberately clashed with Questlove’s metronomic drums.

Palladino came to understand that the time-feel D’Angelo was pursuing owed a great deal to another, transient figure in Electric Lady Studios—someone whom all the accomplished musicians in the sessions, especially D’Angelo, regarded with a kind of reverence; not a musician, actually, but an electronic beatmaker. Questlove in particular had come to worship Jay Dee as a guru who liberated him from the idea of keeping perfect time, and instead imparted a permission to be loose, to be human, to be wrong.

Over the course of the next several years, Jay Dee would become the rhythmic patron saint of that studio band—a collective that would collaborate on myriad projects. Palladino left in 2002 to join the legendary rock band the Who, a gig that lasted for the next fifteen years. But the sessions with D’Angelo, Questlove, Poyser, and Jay Dee—who had taken to calling themselves the Soulquarians—were among the most transformative and liberating Palladino had ever experienced, and these tracks would end up being a career-defining body of work for him, influential to countless musicians thereafter for the rhythms that Palladino himself described as “wobbly” and “messed up.”

When Palladino played the songs for musician friends of his, they invariably remarked:

The timing is kinda weird.

* * *


Copyright © 2022 by Dan Charnas