Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson (pronounced with a “q”), the leader of the hip-hop band, Roots, is standing in the basement of a Greenwich Village record shop, flicking through a rack of second-hand seven-inch vinyl.
“We spoke on it first,” he says, explaining the genesis of his group’s latest collaboration with R&B star John Legend, “and then I guess the second part was doin’ my headache —”
Headache? The 39-year-old musician and DJ trails off, then chuckles. “I’m sorry — I was reading Chaka Khan titles!” Before his search for new records derailed his train of thought, ?uestlove, had meant to say “homework”, not “headache”.
And on Wake Up!, the album the Roots and Legend recently released, that homework shows — the record sees these very different musicians investigating their shared musical and political heritage.
It is, for the most part, a collection of cover versions of tracks from soul music’s most heavily politicised era.
These are songs of protest, angst and inspiration, soaked in the argot of the civil rights movement and written as the optimism of the 1960s gave way to the 1970s of Vietnam, Watergate and racial tension of a subtly different kind.
Every track sounds as if it could have been written last week, from the Curtis Mayfield-penned Hard Times, about lives lived on the margins of solvency in a cold-shoulder United States, to I Can’t Write Left-Handed, Bill Withers’s tale of a disabled veteran returning home after a distant war.
The two musicians met when Legend was studying in the Roots’s home town of Philadelphia. Specific recollections of their meeting are hazy, though ?uestlove does recall being given a copy of one of the demos Legend made when he was still known as John Stephens. But the two men have formed a particular bond in the past few years through their shared concern for a US that has elected its first black leader — both men volunteered for the Obama campaign — but where the splits in society seem to be widening by the day.
Capitalising on this atmosphere of unrest are the Tea Party protesters, Sarah Palin and Fox News host Glenn Beck, whose rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech was seen as a provocative attempt to appropriate the civil rights movement.
“It was a big triumph to elect a black president of America,” Legend says, “but it revealed a lot of the tension and resentment that other people might feel. It’s still very contested what it means to be American and who gets to stake a claim to being American.”
Initial discussions about which songs to record took place in 2008 when, despite the hope and optimism of Obama’s campaign, both men found plenty of evidence of the chasms separating black and white in the US.
“I had thought this was the beginning of the post-racial period,” says ?uestlove, “but during the primaries, my eyes began to open. I was doing grassroots campaigning for Obama and I would phone Democrats to make sure they were registered.
“I would use another name so they didn’t know what race or colour I was. Some of them were completely honest about how they felt, thinking that it was a white guy calling. You’d ask who they were gonna vote for, and sometimes you’d get an answer like, ‘I would never vote for him, because I think he’s a Muslim and he’s gonna destroy the country’.”
Legend, who has played for Obama at many Democrat events, agrees. “Some of the things people say about him — that he’s a Muslim imam from Kenya who came to subvert American democracy and capitalism — are pretty amazing.”
These days Legend is best known for such pop-soul chart hits as Ordinary People and Green Light and the Roots for the “day job” they took up in March last year as house band on the NBC TV show, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. So people may be surprised to hear them collaborating on a track as angrily political as Mike James Kirkland’s 1972 track, Hang on in There, with its repeated refrain of: “This is my country — you can’t make me leave/ You can’t make me love the way you treat me.”
In a country where children salute the flag before lessons and sports fans stand for the national anthem before football matches, tracks like Hang on in There are powerfully charged. The song spits its patriotism through clenched teeth — it seeks to shame those who ignore the US’s failings. The sentiments are still as urgent and as vital as they are divisive.
“It’s easy to do, ‘This is how bad life is’, but Hang on in There really deals with the emotion, with how some of us are really upset,” says ?uestlove.
Legend interjects. “Hang on in There is really about who’s American, whose country is it. Even though black people have had a very difficult relationship with America and have had the best and worst of America, we still feel like we are American. This is our country, too.” — Guardian News & Media 2010