That was my experience reading Hip Hop Is History. I would read a few sentences, maybe a couple of paragraphs, then go listen to a song I’d never heard before. It took me forEVER to get through this book, though it’s only 297 pages. Then there is a playlist that’s 16 additional pages of songs that Questlove has found meaningful is his life and career. I’ll eventually work my way through that as well.
Questlove, as you probably know, is the co-founder of the hip hop group the Roots, and they act as the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Hip Hop is History is his sixth book. He wrote a portion of it in 2023, which was designated as the 50th anniversary of the creation of hip hop.
However, he dives right in by saying that maybe, just maybe, the music played by DJ Kool Herc in the basement rec room of an apartment building in the Bronx on August 11, 1973, was not the actual birth of the genre, which has been the story for, well, 50 years now.
“There were artists before him that did some of the same things that rappers would later do, whether it was raging against the establishment or prioritizing rhythmic vocals over melodic ones,” he writes in the first chapter, which covers the years 1979 to 1982.
From there, the book breaks down the history of rap and hip hop into eight additional chapters, with each covering five years of the genre.
Each chapter dives into what was happening in the world of rap and hip hop during that time. Sure, Questlove talks about the songs and artists that everyone knows, but he also mentions others who may have had one minor hit, or an unknown artist who influenced one of the big names.
The book doesn’t dance around the darker side of the music either. Questlove talks about the overdose deaths of DJ Screw, who was from Houston, and Mac Miller and Shock G and others. He talks about the murders of Tupac and Biggie and Scott La Rock and Fat Pat and Jam Master Jay. The list goes on.
The book focuses much more on the joy that music has brought to Questlove, first as a kid growing up in Philadelphia as part of a musical family, and now, as a Grammy- and Academy-Award winning practitioner of the genre as well as its historian and curator.
The book concludes with an entertaining epilogue titled Break of Dawn – Introduction to Hip Hop is Still History, where Questlove talks about the book he hopes to see written in 2073, the 100th anniversary, when he will be one-hundred-and-three-years old, and he looks to the future. He concludes with: I’m not sure that I want there to be any more hip hop in 2123. I want it to truly be history. Breakbeats are evidence of how we were once broken, and I want nothing more than to bring about a healing.
