Questlove Reaches Into The Mailbag & Answers - August 6

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Quest Love Show is a production of iHeartRadio. What's going on?

00:00:18
Speaker 2: This is cousin Jake, one of the producers of The Questlove Show. We are back here for a mini episode with the Man, the Myth, the Legend Questlove.

00:00:26
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:00:26
Speaker 2: Man, we've been taping up a storm lately. You know, our dedicated readers have been sending in questions. Encourage everyone you know. Go to Questlove Supreme, the old name of the podcast dot com. There's a great contact us. You can also you can DM the QLs channel not a mere direct or. You can leave us a thoughtful comment on YouTube. We'll try to get the good ones answered. But yeah, we got one actually today. So one of our new episodes is with DJ Muggs of Cypress.

00:00:53
Speaker 1: Hill the Black Sunday comment.

00:00:56
Speaker 2: No, no oka, no, I like no hate, like people have been I hate.

00:01:01
Speaker 3: The clip makes it seem like Black Sunday blew my mind. When I was telling the Han Soul story, I meant to say the debut.

00:01:06
Speaker 1: Album, oh, the self titled, but.

00:01:08
Speaker 3: I was telling him that I got hired when Black Sunday was finished.

00:01:13
Speaker 1: Oh okay, however, and people were.

00:01:15
Speaker 3: Like, I think you met the debut record and that was that's the thing I wanted to make clear that when I'm talking about how my mind was blown. Han Soul played us Me and Tuik then ninety one the title.

00:01:27
Speaker 2: Interesting what was funny too? And you know there's a couple of things, and this happens when you're doing podcasts like Mugs in the clip that by the time you hear this, the animation's out. And thank you by the way, you put up all our animations in your stories. The other day you just went ham.

00:01:40
Speaker 1: It's my favorite thing.

00:01:42
Speaker 2: Yeah, shout out to Nick. But he had mentioned that funk Master Flex when he was doing a and R almost signed jump Around by House of Pain on a single deal. Mugs had attributed Flex to being at priority records. He was at profile like things happen, you know, that's the great thing of oral histories. But so I hear you on the clip, it's still getting a lot of love. Mugs is absolutely getting his flowers. That was an amazing episode. It touched on some of your overlapping history back to rough House and Studio four. But here's the question, and this is from sinestat Canal on YouTube. I butchered that. Apologies. DJ Muggs is a legend. I would say he originated the whole psychedelic, dark cinematic beats, possibly even before Rizza. Many great producers and hard beats came before, but I feel like Muggs was the one who brought that special feeling starting with Black Sunday and especially Temples of Boom. I'm interested in Questlov who knows music history so much better, would agree, So I just wanted, Yeah.

00:02:43
Speaker 3: I will say that probably, you know, hip hop's first introduction to just atonal music. You know, I think we can all pretty much safely say like public enemies work and just really introducing like really really dark musical backdrops is you know, before public Darman, it was like the goal was to rock the party, you know what I mean, and you use like the jam of the moment. And of course I would say that Mugs pretty much and you know, my knowlogy, I always say that eighty seven to ninety two was the crack period and then ninety two to ninety seven was the Weed period, and so Mugs basically just whittled it down to something very specific. So I will indeed say I think that Mugs' is work. And also my theory of like there's a person that's the pioneer, and then the person comes right behind and really nails it. So I agree one hundred percent that I do believe that Mugs was the flag planner of a certain type of dusty, dark musical backdrop that later the Rizon came in and totally just you know, knocked out the part and kind of made his you know.

00:04:10
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean I know those guys, especially through like the Soul Assassin's compilations, there's a lot of overlapping history and just like peer respect and.

00:04:20
Speaker 1: And that's why we were taking members fit so well.

00:04:23
Speaker 3: Grandmasters, Yeah, it fits so well on those particular albums.

00:04:27
Speaker 1: And I think did he not do he did an album with the Ji Yeah, Grandmasters? Yeh yeah, that's yeah.

00:04:32
Speaker 2: All right, we'll keep it in the hip hop space. Since we went there, we'll go to Steve. Can you explain a little bit more about Justin Warfield and quote my field trip to Planet nine that was name dropped on Phrenology that came out of nowhere as well, Because I will say this and you probably don't know this, Yeah, Justin is always messing with Q less.

00:04:53
Speaker 3: Shout out to Justin, you know, really it's just positioning what I had Ursula rucket do.

00:05:00
Speaker 1: Okay, so what's being referred to is ah Man.

00:05:04
Speaker 3: I hate this to this day that I made a banger song for Fantastic Volume two, like my four contributions to Fantastic Volume two, well, namely the one that did make it, which was tell Me with di'angelo, that's.

00:05:22
Speaker 1: One of them, and there were.

00:05:27
Speaker 3: Two that didn't make it that feature Tarik Ryman. And then there was a fourth song that was based on this breakbeat called.

00:05:35
Speaker 1: Disco Tech Soul and Disco Tech's Soul.

00:05:38
Speaker 3: Hip hop fans would know this as the drums of Big Daddy Kane's The Wrath of Kane.

00:05:46
Speaker 1: They're very fast drum break and it was a little too fast I was trying to by Ricky Williams.

00:05:51
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so the deal is, like, because Tarik is always the MC in my head when I'm creating stuff. You know, Tarika is kind of prime for a speed rap and you know he comes from the the Iambic contemporary Yeah, Coolgie Wrap and the Cane Dudu like that, Like that's his zone. And so when I made it, Dylan wanted it. If you look up in one of those like slum Village Lost Scrolls thing. They put up a snippet of it, so that music that.

00:06:25
Speaker 1: Is used on the roll.

00:06:27
Speaker 3: Call portion of Phrenology in which all those rappers are being named started off as a slum village song. I believe if you look up the Lost Scrolls album or whatever, it's Buster Rhymes and slum Village, and it's like if you're making the money and they're making a swing and we're doing our thing, I mean, living it up. That's what it's called. It's called living it up. It did make fantastic Volume two. So then I hit up Dylan and I was like, can I take that track back? And I took it back. Tari didn't have nothing for it, and we had to turn in Phrenology like in a week, and and we're already holding out for a Mary Baraka to write something in the way of things. Water of course being the thirteen minute piece that it was took like at least three days to do. Fun fact like Water at the time when Russell Elevado just got finished with Black Delicious Blazing Arrow album and the Breathe song, the song at the end with like.

00:07:26
Speaker 2: Zach and saw woof three songs in one right.

00:07:30
Speaker 3: So I was there for that and there for watching Russ put his magic on it. And it's all that stuff is analog, it's not you know, that was electric Lady.

00:07:39
Speaker 1: That was electric Lady.

00:07:41
Speaker 3: So you know, Russ has all his tools out and everything, and like though just one echo could take him like forty minutes to get perfectly, and we have to the way it was crafted.

00:07:51
Speaker 1: And so I sat there.

00:07:53
Speaker 3: Doing that session, like yo, this is what I want for water, and so we put water together. But as far as the roll call thing is, I wanted Ursula to just name drop all rappers' names, kind of the way that Samuel Jackson.

00:08:09
Speaker 1: Did in the Do the Right Thing roll Call.

00:08:12
Speaker 3: We Yet we love radio love ro call, you know Gladays Knight and the Pips, the Jackson's Prince and Da Da Da dah.

00:08:18
Speaker 1: So that's what I wanted her to do.

00:08:20
Speaker 3: Weird enough, I tried that idea again two years later when Tarika and I flew down to Miami to work with Scott Storch, and I was.

00:08:32
Speaker 1: Like, well, damn.

00:08:32
Speaker 3: I gave the Slum Village trackaway as an interlude on the Phrenology record, and then I thought, well, since I was thinking of Do the Right Thing, why not just literally recreate the drum break from the Do the Right Thing roll call thing, which we did, and that should have been our song. Someone decided to give it to his girlfriend and that song is called Lighters Up by Little Kim, So the Lighter is Up thing with the little deep, the little simple thing that was kind of the music backdrop of what Samuel Jackson was talking about on his roll call thing.

00:09:12
Speaker 1: So once again I tried to do it again.

00:09:14
Speaker 3: But to answer your question, why was and Justin Warfield the last thing you heard, simply because he's the letter W and he was the last name on the list. So I had Ego Trip's book of rap lists, and it took me like an hour to like write down every name that was inside of both of those Ego Trip books. And I just gave it to Ursula Rucker and she just read one track of like A through f the next one F through and Warfield just happened to.

00:09:47
Speaker 1: Be the last name on track number five.

00:09:51
Speaker 3: And when it stood out, I tried to because we weren't doing pro tools, it would have been easier for me to just shift it inside the song, so it didn't have an ending, but we did it on analog and it would have taken like fifteen minutes for me to figure out a proper delay to slide it back. Because even though I thought, like, I wonder if he thinks like that's a dig or a diss like and Justin Warfield, but no.

00:10:17
Speaker 1: He DMed me was like, hey, why was I singled out like that?

00:10:20
Speaker 3: I was just like, your name is last on this, bro, So.

00:10:34
Speaker 2: I feel like there's some good Justin Warfield talk. At the end of the Prince Paul Classic episode of QLs two.

00:10:40
Speaker 1: Season other Victor, You're steal my shit.

00:10:41
Speaker 2: Man, It's funny you mentioned slum Village. We got a question too, and I'm very curious myself, Like, I know you had a working relationship with BB obviously Dila did as well. What is your relationship to the creation of the Welcome to Detroit album?

00:10:57
Speaker 1: Anny Ah?

00:10:59
Speaker 3: And this is from Rod by the way, I consider you know, you know it's weird. You know, it's better than being on anything that Dyla created or even around.

00:11:13
Speaker 1: I happen to know that I was first to hear like seven of the songs.

00:11:22
Speaker 3: It's almost more of a bragging right, instead of saying like, yeah, I'm on this shit to say I was the first to hear it. I'm not on the record, but you know what I remember. The most legendary Slum Village show of all time is a show that happens in Los Angeles when dyl at the last minute decides, you know what, We're gonna go rogue and do less songs on the playback machine than dat and I'm gonna bring up to NBC three thousands, and so someone has the complete show on tape. I've seen maybe five minutes of it, but I've seen a lot of the sound check. And so this is also the time period in which the day before, maybe two days before the Okay Player two thousand tour is at the House of Blues, and so all three Slum Village members are performing together with the roots backing them up, and during sound check, Dyla starts rocking what I would call the Ohio Players interlude, which is like, I mean, really, it's it's Juni Morrison on Ecstasies again.

00:12:42
Speaker 1: No no boom, boom boom.

00:12:46
Speaker 3: It's one of those interludes on Welcome to Detroit, like he would play your beat and that shit would sit in your head for like months at a time. I begged and begged and begged and beg like, Yo, like that beat, I gotta hear that beat again.

00:12:58
Speaker 1: He's like, all right, I'm gonna put it on the news one. And so when he finally came to the studio, I will.

00:13:04
Speaker 3: Say that this is at the very beginning, the very beginning of what will eventually be Electric Circus.

00:13:14
Speaker 1: Electric Circus was kind of like.

00:13:15
Speaker 3: A year and not a year and a half, like a year and seven months in the making, So I think the I don't know, the very first session was for Electric Circus. Like we had a lot of like amazing songs that like Common and Dyla.

00:13:30
Speaker 1: Just through to the floor.

00:13:32
Speaker 3: Like it had to be super weird for it to make it to the finish line. So the first twenty songs like really good, normal, normal shit.

00:13:39
Speaker 2: Right, and there's a vision board in place, right, like you know what you're trying to do well.

00:13:44
Speaker 1: I didn't know that.

00:13:45
Speaker 3: I'm not saying like, Okay, I'm gonna take a back seat, but I know if I'm really gonna be honest. Stan Conia had us a little worried because all we knew was like whatever comes next after stainkne you ever, like miss a train as it leaves the station and you wait at the platform, you got to wait like eight minutes for the next train to come. So it's almost like if we're on those tracks and we know that a new train is coming to eight minutes and we better run our asses off to the next station to not get hit.

00:14:19
Speaker 1: After Stanconia, and we and this includes D'Angelo, like we were so jarred.

00:14:27
Speaker 3: Over the radical rock star change that Stanconia was from a Quimini that we were basically like, dude, we're almost certain that whatever is going to come after Stanconia is going to be even weirder than that shit. It's almost like we all knew we better come with our most radical shit because and this is what starts. I know for fact that a thousand deaths for di'angelo was the immediate reaction of, oh, I better come with it. And I still maintain that listening to the Roots Come Alive, which is such a slow live record, like when you listen to the next movement, it's so slow, you know, And granted I was also like two hundred pounds heavier than so it's almost like the sluggish and the slowest by that point, you know, I lost like one hundred pounds and so three years of doing that, I was just like, I want to do a faster record.

00:15:28
Speaker 1: So my mind for.

00:15:29
Speaker 3: Knowlogy was the hey, let's do a more energetic record so that when we go on stage, like we could really rock out. And you know, and I think common also, and this is kind of when him and Erica were making an official so he's probably privy to some stuff that we weren't.

00:15:48
Speaker 1: All I know is that and Dila was the last one.

00:15:51
Speaker 3: Dila was like, you know cause by two thousand, I will probably say I think when he here butterflies or like something like not in the camp. Yeah, you know, first it was like music, Sonny, and it was almost like, oh, like wait, this sound is catching on to the world, like you know, messed up drums and all that stuff. So even then I think his reaction was like, Okay, I'm gonna do the opposite of that shit. And literally he's like no more, two thousand, no more. Like he was getting like the straight Detroit like eight o eight nine oh nine, and we're starting from scratch. And so it took about twenty songs before like some weird shit started to happen, and then they were like, this is where we're going. I was kind of protesting a little bit because I figure that at the end of the day the people just be like, ah, I'm mere, this is you know, a.

00:16:43
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:16:43
Speaker 3: But to answer that question, yeah, Day one of Electric Circus, he plays six or seven of the Welcome to Detroit songs and I don't know, I just consider it myself like, oh, I was the first to hear that.

00:17:02
Speaker 2: So ye had the earliest accent.

00:17:03
Speaker 1: That to me is better than Hey, I'm on that.

00:17:05
Speaker 2: So we're gonna end on a funny note or a different non musical note. This is from Allen, who I feel like, keep submitting questions, but Alan, they are all great. I want to ask this, he says, like quest love no Philly accent, others have it? Did you ever have to work on it?

00:17:20
Speaker 1: The cochutin is real.

00:17:22
Speaker 3: I was aware that I didn't talk like Philadelphians, probably by age five, when like I remember the first time, like I went outside to play min got go outside to play okay steal you know, and it resulted in like my first fist fight, and my first fist fight was a tie between like like my hair was unusually like there were afros, and then like my hair was like a lion's man. Like there's some afros that are just like hard froze, and then there's some afros that are so heavy that it makes me look like whatever that monster figure is and mooney Tunes like up but you know, like it's like the orange figure in uh Looney Tunes like that person. So just the whole like mom, cut my hair, cut my hair, the kids are making fun of me, and then you know, like me just not because I was only the only non music show I was allowed to watch was PBS, which at the time was working backwards Zoom Electric Company, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and Sesame Street.

00:18:38
Speaker 1: And I'll probably say that maybe.

00:18:41
Speaker 3: Taking in that much Jim Henson, it starts to wear off on you were suddenly you're avore something like this. And so I would come up the street and I got made fun of because I would say, hey, guys, you know, and then every time I go on, people be.

00:18:57
Speaker 1: Like, hey, guys, how are you doing straight frame.

00:19:01
Speaker 3: Like whatever Grover or Kermit talks like yeah. So I got relentlessly teased for just my happy Hey, guy's how you doing? And it was kind of the seeds of rock yim nobody smiling level of the hood.

00:19:19
Speaker 1: So that ended quickly.

00:19:21
Speaker 3: So my mom was wise enough to be like, you're not going outside, just listening to those records, and so me taking on all those records as a result of me not going outside.

00:19:31
Speaker 1: So I think hanging with Tarik. Tarik is the first person in.

00:19:36
Speaker 3: My life that like one, he never judged me, so to get past the whole making fun of the holes in his jeans or like not knowing like guys, I'm doing this on purpose, like you could show your knees like they didn't know like that level of fashion and whatever. And so Treik was the dude that was take me around the way, and I don't know I'm catching on to. I think that's when like I really just went heavy on join.

00:20:03
Speaker 2: It's almost it just wore off of me. So Tarika is my favorite Philly accent. I'm gonna end with a little aside, and what is the origin story of two fifteen? I mean, I know it's a play on two one.

00:20:18
Speaker 1: Five fine, or he'll say pound or twenty one pound.

00:20:23
Speaker 2: Also, please, if you have a mailbag question, send it to Like I said, questlov Supreme dot Com dm us on ig at the week Answer. We engage all, we read it all and the questions are great and honestly they these episodes do really well and shout out to open Mike Eagle. He obviously is part of this dude.

00:20:41
Speaker 3: They I will actually say I can get more feedback from the miniature episodes than from the real joints, which I was like, okay, who knew?

00:20:50
Speaker 2: So so all right everyone until the next time Peace

00:21:14
Speaker 1: Questlum shows a production of iHeart Radio.