Most Recent Posts

Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson is the drummer and co-founder of the Grammy-Award winning band The Roots, which now serves as the house band for the talk show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. Questlove is coming out with a memoir in June called Mo' Meta Blues, co-written with Ben Greenman. After reading it, you'll feel like you know Questlove. The book is intimate and funny. Plus, you'll come away with a crash course in hip-hop history.

I talked to Questlove by phone on a Tuesday afternoon, while he was preparing for Fallon's show. He was shy when I said I liked his book. He talked to me about the process behind crafting an album, why the movie Spring Breakers made him feel uncool, and what it was like to see Prince roller-skate.

In your book, you say that you write your own reviews of your albums.

I feel a little silly admitting that. I was obsessed with Rolling Stones lead reviews. At the time... it was rare that the music I would listen to would wind up as a lead review. Rare for hip-hop and rap to get that glory. Half the time I was trying to imagine, "What if it were a fair playing field?" For my first six albums, I would draw the illustrations and write the reviews — that's how I craft the record. The perfect review is a 4.5, never a perfect 5. You study it and then manifest it.

You said that in high school you felt like Tariq [Tariq Trotter, also known as Black Thought, the lead MC and co-founder of The Roots] was the cool kid and you were the dweeb. Do you still feel like a dweeb, or is that something you outgrow?

I feel like dweebishness has come full circle. I wear it proudly. When I saw Spring Breakers, I was shaking my head thinking, "Whoa, I'm well-respected in hip-hop and... we really never had that stuff." I was wondering, "Did I just waste that tall glass of rock star-ness?" But I'm staying the course. Dweeb till I die.

Can you tell me more about roller-skating with Prince?

It was the most surreal night of my life. It was me and my then-girlfriend and Eddie Murphy and his girlfriend. Prince had these special skates. The friction of the wheel left a Xanadu glow. It was like watching Billy Jean on skates — everywhere he stepped lit up.

[On Jimmy Fallon,] there are certain celebrities — it'll get tense and silent when they come on the show. It was one of those Fridays when Eddie Murphy was on for the first time. I wanted to know if he remembered. Everyone was like, "Ahmir, shh!" But he looked at me and said "Roller skates!" The fact that we laughed so hard made the whole hallway laugh. I was like, "I told y'all."

Why do you think Prince had you come out to watch him roller-skate?

Prince — he's a normal guy. When he came to Philly once, he had me throw an afterparty at a fourth-story walkup without an elevator. I get a call. And he wants a pool table.

Did you carry it up?

[Laughs] I didn't. They had five guys carry it up. I think he played pool for about 20 minutes.

Why did you decide to be the house band for Jimmy Fallon?

The Record

D'Angelo And Questlove Bare The Roots Of 'Voodoo'

Oblivious to international tensions over a possible North Korean missile launch, Pyongyang residents spilled into the streets Monday to celebrate a major national holiday, the birthday of their first leader, Kim Il Sung.

Girls in red and pink jackets skipped along streets festooned with celebratory banners and flags and parents pushed strollers with babies bundled up against the spring chill as residents of the isolated, impoverished nation began observing a three-day holiday.

There was no sense of panic in the North Korean capital, where very few locals have access to international broadcasts and foreign newspaper headlines speculating about an imminent missile launch and detailing the international diplomacy under way to try to rein Pyongyang in, including a swing through the region by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to try to tamp down emotions and coordinate Washington's response with Beijing, North Korea's most important ally.

Foreign governments have been struggling to assess how seriously to take North Korea's recent torrent of rhetoric — including warnings of possible nuclear war — as it expresses its anger over continuing U.S.-South Korea military maneuvers just across the border. Officials in South Korea, the United States and Japan say intelligence indicates that North Korean officials, fresh off an underground nuclear test in February, are ready to launch a medium-range missile.

North Korea's own media gave little indication Monday of how high the tensions are.

The Rodong Sinmun, the Workers' Party newspaper, featured photos and coverage of current leader Kim Jong Un's overnight visit to the Kumsusan mausoleum to pay respects to his grandfather. There was only one line at the end of the article vowing to bring down the "robber-like U.S. imperialists."

Kim Jong Un's renovation of the memorial palace that once served as his grandfather's presidential offices was opened to the public on Monday, the vast cement plaza replaced by fountains, park benches, trellises and tulips. Stretches of green lawn were marked by small signs indicating which businesses — including the Foreign Trade Bank recently added to a U.S. Treasury blacklist — and government agencies donated funds to help pay for the landscaping.

Braving the cold, gray weather, people lined up in droves to lay bouquets of fake flowers at the bronze statues of Kim and his son, late leader Kim Jong Il, in downtown Pyongyang, as they do for every major holiday in the highly militarized country, where loyalty to the Kims and to the state are drummed in citizens from an early age. They queued at roadside snack stands for rations of peanuts, a holiday tradition. Cheers and screams from a soccer match filled the air.

"Although the situation is tense, people have got bright faces and are very happy," said Han Kyong Sim, a drink stand worker.

Monday marked the official start of the new year according to North Korea's "juche" calendar, which begins with the day of Kim Il Sung's birth in 1912. But unlike last year, the centennial of his birthday, there are no big parades in store this week, and North Koreans were planning to use it as a day to catch up with friends and family.

But while there has almost no sense of crisis in Pyongyang, North Korea's official posture toward the outside appears to be as hardline as ever.

On Sunday, it rejected South Korea's proposal to resolve tensions through dialogue. North Korea said it has no intention of talking with Seoul unless it abandons what it called the rival South's confrontational posture. South Korea's unification ministry spokesman, Kim Hyung-suk, called that response "very regrettable" on Monday, but said that the South remains open to dialogue.

A top North Korean leader, Kim Yong Nam, president of the Presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, also told a gathering of high officials Sunday that the North must bolster its nuclear arsenal further and "wage a stronger all-out action with the U.S. to cope with the prevailing wartime situation," according to footage from the North's state TV.

South Korea's defense minister, Kim Kwan-jin, told a parliamentary committee in Seoul on Monday that North Korea still appears poised to launch a missile from its east coast, though he declined to disclose how he got the information.

Kerry, during his trip, has warned North Korea not to conduct a missile test, saying it will be an act of provocation that "will raise people's temperatures" and further isolate the country and its people. In Tokyo on Sunday, Kerry said the U.S. was "prepared to reach out" but Pyongyang must first lower tensions and honor previous agreements.

North Korea has also pulled workers from the Kaesong factory complex on its side of the Demilitarized Zone, the last remaining symbols of inter-Korean rapprochement, in a pointed jab at South Korea. South Korean-run factories provided more than 50,000 jobs for North Korea, where two-thirds of the population struggle with food shortages, according to the World Food Program.

North Korea has issued no specific warnings to ships and aircraft that a missile test is imminent, and is also continuing efforts to increase tourism.

"I'm never embarrassed to be out here," Oliver says. "I'm proud of what I do. I can dance and not get pulled over by the cops and arrested. And I like dancing anyways. So if I'm not going to be doing it here, I'm going to be doing it somewhere else. But here I get to get paid for it, so it's great."

It's part time and minimum wage (he makes $8 an hour). Oliver says he's happy with that for now. One perk of the job: free tax prep. But he doesn't take advantage of it. He has his own tax preparer: Mom.

Oliver still lives at home with his mother, Vivian Oliver. "I usually use TurboTax," she says.

Sitting in the living room, they talk about his taxes and his work, and they open his W-2s for the first time. They don't add up to a lot. On one, his earnings totaled $398. On the other, Robert guesses he earned about $1,000.

"A thousand? No not even close," Vivian says. "Honey, you only worked there a couple of days. $114."

For the year, he's earned $512. That's not much, but Robert is optimistic.

"That's not good, you know, that's terrible," he says. "But for me it's kind of like, where there's a will, there's a way, you know?"

When he has work, Oliver works hard. He sold incense and oils at malls, gas stations and on Venice Beach — unsteady work he really liked. He says he's tried to get a full-time job, but it's tough. He doesn't have computer skills, he doesn't have a driver's license and he just got his GED last year.

"He worked on his GED longer than anyone alive," his mom says.

On the ride back to work, Oliver opened up a little more about his life and why he and his mother are upbeat about his future.

"When Mom adopted us, I didn't even know how to read and write," he says.

Robert was 8 when he and his younger sister were adopted. Before he got to his mother's house, he says, he had cycled through five different foster homes. His mother put a stop to that. She nurtured him and gave him stability.

"The skills that I have learned since I've been with Mom — I'm very thankful for that," he says.

He has learned to read, learned to communicate better, has had years of therapy, and has become part of a vibrant church community. For Oliver, this job is an accomplishment. It's a world away from the life he saw for himself.

"I probably would've joined a gang and I probably would've did things that I know I shouldn't have been doing, and I probably would have been in jail or dead," he says.

He heads back into the office to get into his Statue of Liberty outfit, clamp on his headphones and hit the corner. This Tax Day is his last day here, until next January, if he still needs the job.

President Obama's nominee to lead the Labor Department has been one of the most aggressive advocates for civil rights in decades. Tom Perez prosecuted a record number of hate crimes cases and extracted huge settlements from banks that overcharged minorities for home loans.

But some Republican lawmakers say those same qualities give them pause about voting to confirm Perez as a Cabinet member.

'Making A Huge Difference'

As the son of Dominican immigrants, and a guy who helped put himself through Ivy League schools by working as a garbage collector, Perez knows something about climbing the ladder.

"Over my career, I've learned that true progress is possible if you keep an open mind, listen to all sides and focus on results," he said last month during the White House rollout of his nomination.

About those results: For more than three years, Perez has run the civil rights unit as an assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, where he has sued Texas and South Carolina over voting rights and searched for abusive law enforcement patterns in more than a dozen police departments.

Perez has done something else, too, says Mark Perriello, president of the American Association of People With Disabilities.

"All the work that he has done to secure the rights of people with disabilities to live independently in the community, to have access to polling, to have access to simple things like technology and watching Netflix with your family at home at night has been nothing less than stellar," Perriello says. "He is making a huge difference."

Perriello and dozens of other disability rights advocates have just launched a campaign to support Perez as labor secretary.

It's support the nominee may need to counter vocal opposition from Republican lawmakers like Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley.

"This person's going to have trouble — both through the committee process and on the floor," Grassley says. "He's got a lot of questions to answer."

A Quid Pro Quo?

Grassley and two House Republicans, Darrell Issa of California and Robert Goodlatte of Virginia, released a report late Sunday that blasted Perez for his role in what they call a quid pro quo last year, when the Justice Department agreed not to support a big whistle-blower lawsuit against St. Paul, Minn., for mishandling federal money.

The report drafted by congressional Republicans says Perez's testimony about the episode conflicts with that of other accounts from people inside the Justice Department and lawyers in Minnesota who worked on the issue.

"Perez's inconsistent testimony on a range of subjects calls into question the reliability of his testimony and raises questions about his truthfulness during his transcribed interview," the report said.

The report also alleges Perez engineered a plan to back away from the whistle-blower case without notifying his superiors or ethics lawyers at Justice about all the facts, and that he meddled with the decision-making by career lawyers in the government, while asking them to avoid putting the details in writing, placing "ideology over objectivity and politics over the rule of law."

The situation "confused and frustrated the career Justice Department attorneys ... who described the situation as 'weirdness,' 'ridiculous' and 'cover your head ping pong,' " the report added.

House Democrats countered that the criticism was political.

"Instead of identifying inappropriate conduct by Mr. Perez, it appears that the accusations against him are part of a broader political campaign to undermine the legal safeguards against discrimination that Mr. Perez was protecting," they said in a statement.

Justice Department spokeswoman Dena Iverson also defended Perez's actions in an emailed statement. "The resolution reached in these cases was in the best interests of the United States and consistent with the Department's broad discretion to consider policy and other factors — including pending litigation — in resolving False Claims Act [whistle-blower] matters," Iverson said.

She pointed out that private plaintiffs still were allowed to move forward with their whistle-blower case.

"The Department's decision was appropriate, and followed an examination of the relevant facts, legal, and policy considerations at issue, and following Mr. Perez's consultation with career ethics officers," she added.

St. Paul leaders agreed to drop their Supreme Court challenge to a legal tool known as disparate impact theory that the Justice Department often uses in housing discrimination cases. (For an explanation of disparate impact theory, check out this interview on NPR's Tell Me More. There's more background on the Supreme Court case and the St. Paul whistle-blower lawsuit in The Two-Way blog.)

Grassley says that kind of arrangement is not against the law, "but it looks pretty bad right now when somebody at that high level of government makes a quid pro quo that costs the taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars ... just for the purpose, for philosophical or ideological purposes, to get a case to the Supreme Court dropped."

Facing Questions

Asked if he would be prepared to block the Perez nomination, Grassley replied: "I'm at least prepared to resist any attempt to bring it up until we get all of our questions answered."

At his Senate confirmation hearing before the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on Thursday, Perez could face even more questions about his management at the Justice Department's civil rights unit. The department's inspector general recently concluded the atmosphere there is filled with partisanship and bullying, though watchdogs say most of that trouble dates back a decade, before Perez arrived.

The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is planning its own hearing this week on those issues. In a statement to NPR, Goodlatte, the committee chairman, said he was "shocked the President is moving forward with this nomination. ... Mr. Perez should face tough questions about this backroom deal he helped coordinate, his role in interfering with a Supreme Court case, and his mismanagement of the Civil Rights Division."

Supporters of Perez say the White House knew all about those controversies when it nominated him to lead the Labor Department. Obama says he wants Perez to play a big role in such issues as long-term unemployment, immigration and the minimum wage.

"His story," the president said last month, "reminds us of this country's promise: That if you're willing to work hard, it doesn't matter who you are, where you come from, what your last name is, you can make it if you try."

Perez is in line to become one of the highest-profile Latino Cabinet members in recent memory, if he can get past Senate Republicans.