It’s the last task that provides the most insight into this strange, compelling book he calls a memoir. Since forming the Roots with Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter in the late 1980s, Thompson has released 10 records with the band produced records by D’Angelo, Common, Al Green, and others recorded with John Mayer and Christina Aguilera toured with the everyone from the Fugees to the Dave Matthews Band written and arranged for other major artists worked in films and on Chapelle’s Show started a full-time day job as Fallon’s bandleader and deejayed countless gigs (and I mean countless he deejays almost every night of the week). It’s these myriad interests that allow him to straddle the borders of many nations in the game of Risk that is the modern entertainment industry and have occasioned the diversity of his life’s work. He is a pastiche of influences, including soul music, Saturday-morning TV, Christianity, gangster rap, John Kennedy Toole, the Sugarhill Gang, and Risko illustrations, to name a few. His shift from drummer in the progressive rap band the Roots (the “last” rap band, according to Thompson) to bandleader, with the same band, for Late Night With Jimmy Fallon-from Allen Ginsberg to Lawrence Welk (albeit an infinitely hip 350-pound teddy bear of a Lawrence Welk, with an Afro)-is plausible only because Thompson has never been just one thing. The odd combination-the socialist philosopher and author of Race Matters the subtle, musically inclined comic actor from Saturday Night Live and Portlandia-is only appropriate for a memoir from a man whose career and life in the arts is as diverse as Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s. You are unlikely to find another book that can boast of endorsements from both Cornel West and Fred Armisen.
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