Creative Quest

by Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

Through 2016, I started to use my regular gigs at places like Brooklyn Bowl as a means to experiment with playlists. I even fine-tuned when I had more high-profile gigs, like celebrity weddings. But it wasn’t just refining my DJ set. I was working toward something big, a Unified Theory of Everything As Explained Through Music. I debuted that new set, or a version of it, at the Hamilton after-party. That was a seven-hour set at Tavern on the Green, from 11 P.M. until 6 A.M., and it went even deeper into my sense of American music and American history. I started playing Nintendo themes, Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! I was the museum curator hanging a Roy Lichtenstein next to an Andrew Wyeth to raise issues of nature and artifice, history and media. I was out there on the Tilt-a-Whirl, and the audience stayed with me. Afterward, the actress Lupita Nyong’o wrote me a love letter—well, not to me, exactly, but to my set. I was emboldened by that. How can you not be emboldened by a love letter from Lupita Nyong’o? I had started with the idea of wanting to make a perfect playlist, but now I was on a cultural-historical mission. I would relate the perfect overarching story of America—of humanity—through a DJ set. It was the same as hanging a great museum exhibit, but instead of paintings I would use songs.