The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet. But Amir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching a… - Questlove

as I loved all those artists, as much as I saw their genius, the fact of the matter is that for a while, there was only Prince. It may be hard for kids now to recover a sense of how out there Prince was in the early eighties, how far above the crowd he was operating, especially since the Prince today is kind of the opposite of the Prince then. But in the early eighties, people spoke of him as a genius, and they weren’t kidding, not even a little.

Make your environment reflective of your tastes. Eliminate distractions, including the distraction of being without any of the distractions you need.

On the plantations the slave owners would take their slaves’ drums away because they didn’t want them communicating with other slaves. They were afraid that the drum was some kind of magic signal system, a primal, coded language, which it was. And is. When the drums were taken away, other instruments were taken up — fifes and fiddles and the rest, and they were used for celebration and lamentation both, and a new kind of song sprung up, a work song, to document the labor in the fields, to pass the time, to pass on the content of the time, so that people would know what had happened.