VIA PRESS RELEASE | Academy Award-winning director, Grammy Award-winning musician, and New York Times Bestselling author Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson shares details on his brand new landmark book Hip-Hop Is History. Set to debut on June 11th, via the author’s own AUWA Books imprint, this is a book only Questlove could have written: a perceptive and personal reflection on the first half-century of hip-hop.
In the incredible new book, written with Ben Greenman, Questlove skillfully traces the creative and cultural forces that made and shaped hip-hop, highlighting both the forgotten but influential gems and the undeniable chart-topping hits—and weaves it all together with the stories no one else knows. It is at once an intimate, sharply observed story of a cultural revolution and a sweeping, grand theory of the evolution of the great artistic movement of our time. And Questlove, of course, approaches it with not only the encyclopedic fluency and passion of an obsessive fan but also the expertise and originality of an innovative participant.
When hip-hop first emerged in the 1970s, it wasn’t expected to become the cultural force it is today. But for a young Black kid growing up in a musical family in Philadelphia, it was everything. He stayed up late to hear the newest songs on the radio. He saved his money to buy vinyl as soon as it landed. He even started to try to make his own songs. That kid was Questlove, and decades later, he is a six-time Grammy Award-winning musician, an Academy Award-winning filmmaker, a New York Times bestselling author, a producer, an entrepreneur, a cofounder of one of hip-hop’s defining acts (the Roots), and the genre’s unofficial in-house historian.
Hip-hop is history, and also his history.
PHOTO: DANIEL DORSA
