?uestlove new interview (new D'angelo album is 97% done)

[The_Ripper]

Pitchfork: Do you regret playing that walk-on music for Michele Bachmann?
?uestlove: It wasn't like a chess move where you have to think 12 steps ahead; you're just, like, "Fuck, all right, I'm gonna do it," in a kamikaze-type way. And I really didn't think about how it could be perceived as a misogynist swipe-- it didn't hit me until my [Twitter] timeline started showing up that it was seen that way. I was like, "Fuck, I forgot 'bitch' is actually in the title."It deeply offended a lot of women's groups and non-Bachmann supporters, and for that I'm deeply sorry. I'm not parading like I'm the poster boy for the feminist movement, but those who truly know me know that that's not me. I was really just going with her whole revisionist history angle, I wasn't calling it out on her being a woman.

Pitchfork: What kind of reactions have you received since?
?: I've seen some really colorful epithets in the past four days, but "nigger fuckhead ghetto stick" is probably the one that takes the cake. I'm still trying to get my head around that one. Blocking 3,500 tea party extremists [on Twitter] in a three day period is no fun, especially when you're a drummer dangerously close to carpal tunnel. In the end, was it worth it? Absolutely not.

Pitchfork: Was there a moment when you were scared that you might get fired?
?: Yeah, last Wednesday, the day before [Thanksgiving]. We were seeing where she was going to go with it because, if you call the right channels, next thing you know advertisers are in the NBC building asking for proper action to be done. So we were definitely waiting with bated breath. And then her camp was like, "Look, it's Thanksgiving. Let's just put all this behind us and call it a day."

The only one who was not too happy with the result was D'Angelo. [laughs] He was praying I got suspended for six months or a year. He was like, "You know what that means right? That means you're going to go on tour with me, man! We're gonna be together again!" I was like, "Welcome to the real world: People don't get suspended for a year, they get fired."

Pitchfork: Is that D'Angelo tour a real thing?
?: It's an extremely real thing. [Bassist] Pino Palladino just committed. My worst nightmare Chris Dave is his drummer-- you need the most dangerous drummer alive on that tour. I fear the magic those two are going to make.

Pitchfork: So that's happening next year?
?: He goes to Europe in January. The album is pretty much 97% done. He's just finishing his lyrics now. He needs somebody to smack him and take the record away from him because it's pretty much finished. But I know he must turn this record in like three days before Christmas and that his first show is in Europe, and that he's going to do a whole bunch. They even named it the Occupy Music Tour, so I know they're serious about it.

For all intents and purposes, this album is the black version of [The Beach Boys'] Smile-- at best, it will go down in the Smile/There's a Riot Goin' On/Miles Davis' On the Corner category. That's what I'm hoping for. There's stuff on there I was amazed at, like new music patches [keyboard sounds] I've never heard before. I'd ask him, "What kind of keyboard is that?" I thought it was some old vintage thing. But he builds his own patches.

One song we worked on called "Charade" has this trombone patch that he re-EQ'd and then put through an envelope filter and then added a vibraphone noise on top and made a whole new patch out of it. He's the only person I know that takes a Herbie Hancock approach, or Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff-- the two musician/engineers who programmed all of Stevie Wonder's genius-period stuff-- approach. That's the last time I ever heard of somebody building patches. We'll see if history is kind to it.

[Black Excellence]

good read.