Stereo Warning

Stereo Warning: Many people thought that signing with Def Jam would mean your big commercial break. But you stuck to your guns. Were you ever tempted to get Jay-Z to guest-star on Game Theory or do anything that would draw mainstream attention?
?uestlove: We kinda knew that people were gonna overestimate the situation. And I love playing people for a loop. I knew everyone expected us to break open the bottle of Cristal, hop on a yacht, have an iced-out chain and holler 'we're partying now.' That would've been a dreadful mistake. The look on people's faces when they heard the record and said 'oh shit, they didn't sell out' was great. How strange is it that Def Jam is a label that once overflowed with artistic merit? In the 80's, if it said Def Jam you knew that the album was an instant classic. And now it has almost the opposite meaning.

Still, there's nothing wrong with being successful. Do you ever wonder 'hey, when are we really gonna be rich?'
Hip-hop is a strange story, man. The lesson that I learned in the past two years is that hip-hop is full of tall tales. Eighty percent of those people that we thought were living the life, I'm living better than them. And that's real. I didn't know that Bentley was leased, that house was rented. You sit at home and watch MTV Cribs and you're like 'man, what's going on here?' But then the truth starts to reveal itself. I know a very high profile person in the hip-hop nation that only has $1,000 to their name. I won't say who it is...

But you cannot survive on record sales alone. There's two ways to making money. Either you're ubiquitous, or you tour. A person like Jay Z, he has to have the clothing line. I'm the king of touring in hip hop. But half the hip-hop nation, they don't even have a good show. So you deal with people that depend on radio sales, publishing checks, advances for the next record. Unless they're doing commercials or endorsing a clothing line, they're not getting paid.

It used to irk me, but then I looked at my life, and said wait a minute, my life is fine. My definition of success is having a comfortable home for me. I'm on the road 200 days out of the year so I'm not even at home to enjoy my home. I bought my mom her dream house, I'm taking care of my father and my siblings, I feel like this is success. If this were to stop tomorrow, I'd still be cool for 10 years.

Your former band mate Scott Storch seems to be cultivating an image quite different from yours, all about money and flash. Is that the Scott you know or has he changed?
He's Scott playing dress-up. Even back in the day, if Scott had only $500, he'd spend $800. He now has $17 million, but he spends $30 million. Scott is addicted to making music. Scott won't let 10 minutes go by unless there's an idea in his head. The fact that all this music can flow out of him is amazing to me. Do you ever see little girls play dress-up in their mom's closet? That's how Scott is. Scott is still a little kid, but he's got his big brother's Gucci glasses and all these links.

You've been going counter to mainstream hip-hop for a long time now, but still you have dedicated fans and support from critics. To what do you owe your success and longevity?
Even though hip-hop is a genre, it's just an amalgamation of all types of music. That's something the godfather of hip-hop, Afrika Bambaataa taught me. He would DJ a party in the Bronx and he could play the Commodores in one moment and then turn around and play Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones. You do that today at a hip-hop party, you're liable to get beat up. But Afrika Bambaataa felt there was hip-hop in that song because there is a long percussion break in the beginning. That's how I approach my music now when I present it live. There is rock stuff that we can do that can still have a hip-hop feel to it, as in something that you feel in your soul. There's a way to talk to different audiences. By day I can do a song with Mobb Deep and then by night I can do a song with Bob Dylan and it will still all make sense.

I read somewhere that for the album before this you tried hard to please your boss at Interscope, Jimmy Iovine, and make a more commercial album. Is that true and how did you approach Game Theory differently?
Tipping Point was the closest I've ever gotten to trying to approximate what he wanted to hear. And that's only because I misjudged the situation. When we first met him, he thought that Phrenology was our first record and we were like 'wait, you don't know that we have five albums before this and that we actually have a Grammy and we went plantinum before?'. He didn't know any of that, he though we were a hip-hop rock group. Then it hit me that he probably just put the CD on and skipped through the songs for two minutes before we walked into his office. As a result, we were very cautious with making that record. That's something we've never been before, cautious. We decided to keep the record dry. It wasn't necessarily our commercial attempt, but it was as risk-free as The Roots have ever been. I took out all the experimentation. I still think there are moments of brilliance on that record, Star is one of the best songs in our career. So with this album, the one thing that Jay-Z guaranteed us was absolute freedom for our vision.

You're one of the few artists in hip-hop now to still have a socially conscious message. I was talking to Chuck D recently and he was saying that as much as he hates the cash, cars & bitches lyrics of many successful rappers, he understands the kind of pressure they are under. They see that stuff sells and they feel like they have to copy it. Do you ever feel that pressure? Do you think artists have a responsibility with their message to their fans and the community?
If we were to start now and talk about our boat in Miami, people would look at us like, 'you ain't got no boat in Miami, get out of here!' For us, it's just more believable to be ourselves. I know we're frustrated, I know that Bush is the worst president we've ever had, I know you feel like they stole the election and nothing I'm going to say is going to start a revolution, but for 2006 to go by and nobody to talk about how messed up society is, it's amazing to me. I just can't believe that no one is touching upon political subjects. So I felt like it was our responsibility.

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Tags: the roots roots rap jay-z jay z hip hop hip-hop questlove paris hilton scott storch public enemy chuck d