Questlove

Bestselling author and Sundance award-winning director Questlove harnesses his encyclopedic knowledge of popular music and his deep curiosity about history to examine America over the past fifty years. Choosing one essential track from each year, Questlove unpacks each song's significance, revealing the pivotal role that American music plays around issues of race, gender, politics, and identity. Whether he is exploring how Black identity reshaped...

"Questlove is best known for his achievements in the music world, but his interest in food runs a close second. He has hosted a series of renowned Food Salons and conversations with some of America's most prominent chefs. Now he is turning his hand to creating a cookbook. In Mixtape Potluck Cookbook, Questlove imagines the ultimate potluck dinner party, inviting more than fifty chefs, entertainers, and musicians--such as Eric Ripert, Natalie Portman,...

"In 1970, in soundstage on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of men and women of various ages and races met to finish the first season of a children's TV program. They had identified a social problem: poor children were entering kindergarten without the learning skills of their middle-class counterparts. They hoped, too, that they had identified a solution: to use television to better prepare these disadvantaged kids for school. No one knew then,...

"The first memoir from the legendary Sly Stone, the front man of the iconic band Sly and the Family Stone"--

In his acclaimed debut as a filmmaker, Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson presents a powerful and transporting documentary, part music film, part historical record, created around an epic event that celebrated Black history, culture, and fashion. Over the course of six weeks in the summer of 1969, just one hundred miles south of Woodstock, The Harlem Cultural Festival was filmed in Mount Morris Park (now Marcus Garvey Park). The footage was largely forgotten,...

Fela Anikulapo-Kuti created a new musical movement, Afrobeat, a combination of jazz, funk, and Nigerian percussion styles. It was also a political force, a propulsive delivery system of Fela's revolutionary ideas, pitched against the dictatorial Nigerian government of the 1970s and 1980s. His influence helped bring a tilt towards democracy in Nigeria and promoted Pan-Africanist politics to the world. The power and potency of Fela's music and message...