"For us?" I said. "Why?"

"We're f.u.c.ked," he said. "Geffen's going to drop us."

"Slow down," I said. "I don't understand."

"All of their talent has dried up," he said. "Aerosmith went back to Sony. And you and I both know there's no new Guns 'N Roses alb.u.m coming." GNR had released Use Your Illusion in 1991, which was a two-part alb.u.m with two separate releases, and it was huge, and then they had put out The Spaghetti Incident?, an underwhelming collection of punk and hard-rock covers, in 1993. They seemed like they were coming apart at the seams with infighting, though no one at the time knew quite how apart they were coming. (The proper follow-up to Use Your Illusion, Chinese Democracy, wouldn't come out for another fifteen years, and that was with a completely different lineup.) And then this had happened, with Cobain. The money machine priming the pump at Geffen had suddenly, violently, vanished.

"You know what we're going to have to do?" Rich said. "We're going to have to pull another Organix."

"What do you mean?" I asked, but I knew what he meant.

We spent four days holed up in the studio finishing the record, shooting the cover photos, making a video. We needed to get our money from the label, because Rich had an idea of what we should do with it.

The way the Mercury contract had happened, or almost happened, we had gone pretty far in the process, and we had met lots of people who we imagined we would like working with. One of the most crucial sources of support within the Mercury family was a man named Gilles Peterson, a Swiss record collector and DJ. He was the man who got the ball rolling with the label in the first place. In fact, he was so in love with Organix that he took our CD and pressed it on wax, which was unheard of then, and used that private pressing to DJ the record in the clubs.

We had such a great relationship with Gilles that we hated to let it go when we switched over to Geffen. As it turns out, we didn't have to. He begged Wendy Goldstein to let him release an EP of our material. Even though we had spurned the American branch of Mercury, Geffen allowed Gilles to license a seven-song EP, From the Ground Up, and release it on his own label, Talking Loud, in Europe. It had "Mellow My Man," "Distortion to Static," and a number of other songs that were on Do You Want More?!!!??!

And so, in the wake of Kurt Cobain's suicide, with our record done, we took our cash, told everyone they'd see us at the end of June, and got ready to go to England.5 Just like before, Rich had the idea that if we established ourselves elsewhere, we could return to the states triumphantly: hail the conquering heroes and so forth.

We had two last bits of business to conduct, one right after the other. We went on Yo! MTV Raps to host with Ed Lover and Dr. Dre, and then we went down to Washington, D.C. to do a show called Rap City-they wanted us to film it then for a later airdate. While we were in D.C., we were invited to pay tribute to Grandmaster Flash at an awards show sponsored by an organization called IAAAM, the International a.s.sociation of African American Music. There were two honorees that night, Grandmaster Flash and Stevie Wonder, and after the ceremony Stevie invited us to come back to his hotel suite. It had a piano in it, of course, and he sat down and started to play. It was a very surreal moment. Natalie Cole was there with her husband Andre Fischer, who had been the drummer of the soul group Rufus and was an idol of mine. Recall that he is also the nephew of Clare Fischer, the legendary string arranger who worked with hundreds of artists, including Prince-he was responsible for the string arrangements on the Parade record, for example. I talked about him earlier when I was going on about the Rufus alb.u.m. Well, I was starstruck, and I'm sure Andre was eating it up. He wasn't the focal point of Rufus, but to me he was the most important player in the group. And he was telling some crazy story about being on the road with Chaka Khan and having to read her instructions about feminine hygiene products. It blew my mind. I was with Andre Fischer, who was sitting in front of his wife, Natalie Cole, telling a story about Chaka Khan and tampons. That happened. Oh, and the whole time, there's Stevie Wonder sitting in the background, playing the best songs in his catalog.

I have since learned that it's a tricky thing to meet your idols, and even trickier when the thing you want from them is the thing that they do in public but, for whatever reason, can't or won't do in private. If you met Michael Jackson and asked him to moonwalk in front of you, you'd be disappointed. If you meet Prince and you want him to do a kicka.s.s guitar solo in front of you, well, that's not going to happen. Most comedians I have met are quiet and depressed, the furthest thing imaginable from their stage personas. Stevie Wonder is the exception to this rule. He knows that you want him to sit down at the piano and launch into a brain-expanding version of "Ribbon in the Sky," and that's exactly what he does. It definitely has an effect on the ladies, too, but even if it's partly about women, if Stevie Wonder's deciding to sing his songs to help him pull women, I'm glad I'm in earshot. That was a rare, magical moment in my life.

We thought From the Ground Up, the EP Gilles Peterson was putting out, would be a staging effort for Do You Want More?!!!??! We thought we'd have something in London: opportunity, money, something. We had nothing. We were staying in flophouses and then sometimes we were literally homeless, eating cheese and bread. Steve Coleman and Greg Osby used to tell me that when they went to play in Europe, they wouldn't even book hotels, that they just played their a.s.ses off and hoped they went home with a girl that night. We tried that existence for a little while. Then this acid-jazz group called Galliano saved us. They asked us to do a remix. We went from the brink of extinction to a loft in Queen's Crescent over a fish-and-chip shop.6 It had a rusty stereo on the floor and all we did was listen to Method Man's Tical and Pete Rock and CL Smooth's Main Ingredient. If I hear those alb.u.ms now, that's what I think of: the cheap fish and chips from downstairs, or drying my clothes by turning the oven on and putting my underwear in there, or our s.e.xy-a.s.s next-door neighbor who wouldn't give us none, or me walking through Trafalgar Square seeing Take That posters, or hanging with DJ Dego and hearing him invent drum and ba.s.s. He played "Sweet Love" by Anita Baker-who the h.e.l.l plays that? But then it exploded into the drum and ba.s.s, and there were black kids moshing. I had never seen that.

London was fun, in a sense. We flipped a coin to see who slept on the bed and who slept on the floor. I explored the city as much as I wanted. Prince had just opened up a shop in Camden, and I went there as often as I could. But underneath the sense of adventure, it was kind of a dark time. For starters, Tariq and I had our very first real fight. It was a fistfight over a production faux pas. As it turned out, he was not credited for producing the t.i.tle cut, "Do You Want More?!!!??!" It was neglect on my part and Rich's part, just an oversight, nothing intentional, but he took it personally. He felt like maybe he was being squeezed out of the group. He confronted me and we went at it in the hallway, shoulder to shoulder. No one got hurt, really. It devolved into wrestling pretty fast. He got up and marched off in what looked like triumph.

"I'm not hurt," he said.

I didn't know until later that he went off down the hall and then snuck around a door so he could sit down on a chair and recover. I'd like to say that the wounds from that fight healed up right away, but the fact is that that was a fight so dark and so deep that I believe it affects us to this day. There's still an invisible wedge. That fight made me more insular and introverted, more careful around everyone.

London was also the first time that I remember dealing with Malik's impending drug problem. I guess it had been around for years, but I hadn't noticed. Back in Philly, he used to sell oils. Black men from Philly always had Muslim oils on them. Even now, people tell me that I smell like maple syrup. My father used to buy his oils from Malik, and one day he realized that Malik was cutting his product with baby oil, and that's when he figured out that there might be drugs somewhere in the picture. London was when I realized that Malik's behavior was more than just recreational, that he had a real problem. I'm not surprised that it took me that long to find out. I was naive about drugs, in part because my father put the fear of G.o.d in me. When I was five, there was a brand of cigarette called Belairs. The pack had clouds on it and I thought they looked nice. I told him I wanted to smoke, and his reaction was simple. If you said you wanted to smoke, you had to smoke, even if you were five years old. He made me smoke fourteen cigarettes. It was one of his most evil punishments.

Our time in London wasn't all dissension. In putting ourselves into temporary exile, we also gave ourselves the opportunity to see ourselves more clearly. Sometimes that led to fights, but just as often it led to important realizations. That stay in London was also the period where we met the first in a long line of female tour managers for the Roots. Someone had a theory that we needed female energy to offset the male-dominated personnel in the group, and as it turned out, whoever said that was right. Having a woman in that role ensured that more got done. Partly it was because we paid attention to her, and partly it was because the difference between a male tour manager and a sultry female tour manager might be half-off rates. Suddenly, we were using more honey than vinegar. Club owners would be like putty in their hands. We learned that lesson and it stuck for a long time: our first male tour manager didn't appear until almost twenty years later.

In general, though, that time wasn't traumatic. It was romantic. I still hang with starving artists now, friends in bands that aren't getting off the ground, or that aren't getting them where they want to go. I have talked people out of leaving behind their careers as artists or musicians, and in one or two cases I have even done my best to help talk people out of killing themselves-they were that frustrated and depressed with the game. It's a problem with the fundamental mentality of rap, maybe. Rap has a strong mentality of getting paid. And so if you have that romantic approach, the dedication to it as an art form, you preach the opposite. But is that naive? Imagine if there was a Legend of Bagger Vancetype figure who came to me when I was in London and told me that I wouldn't see my first big check-I mean a real big check, a check that could make me feel secure and safe-until I was twenty years into the industry. I don't know what I would have done. Back then, in London, I didn't know enough yet to be truly frustrated. It was all new. Later on, though, when lean times returned, a sense of panic surfaced, and in those times I didn't always react well. We were succeeding, or appeared to be succeeding, and I felt nothing but failure because my electricity got turned off or I had to go, hat in hand, to a friend to borrow some money. Whenever I would feel reckless, whenever I threatened to quit the band, Rich just told me to stay the course. He told me I was overthinking it. As it turns out he was right. Or was it just that he was wrong for a long time and then he stopped being wrong?

There are spiritual experiences that aren't necessarily religious experiences, even if they take place in a church. I know because I had a moment like that in London, and it changed my life forever. Early in our stay there, I fell in love with a South African girl. We spent lots of time together right off the bat, but after a little while, she was called away by the election in her home country. I was hurt, but what could you do? She felt it was her duty to go home and partic.i.p.ate in the historic vote to end apartheid, and it was hard to make the case that hanging out with me the rest of the summer was more important. Before she left, she made me promise that I would go see a South African DJ named Aba Shanti. He performed at a place called House of Roots, which was a club that had previously been a church. The name seemed like a nice coincidence, maybe part of a divine plan, and so the whole band went to see him. I went with special interest, not just because of the girl but because I had been a DJ of one kind or another since I was eleven years old. But that one night changed everything I knew about DJing. Up to that moment, it was mainly about being a human iPod: you served up the best songs to people that they could imagine, and some that they couldn't imagine. After seeing Aba Shanti, I realized that a DJ could not only have a personality but be a personality, and that he could be a person with power over the emotions of others. He made me see that it was a psychological and even sacred responsibility, all in one night.

We went to the House of Roots and Aba Shanti was up at the pulpit, but with his back facing toward the audience. He was facing the cross, flanked by absolutely huge speakers. Unlike almost any other DJ I had ever seen, he only used one turntable, and though that seemed like a limitation at first, it turned out to be the greatest thing about him, because it was so integral to his sense of theater and control. When he finished one record, the suspense of what he was going to play next was almost too much to bear.

But Aba Shanti's greatest contribution to my life, and to my band, and to my music, was the way he handled sound. He did this trick before he played records where he went to the control board and turned everything way down: he took all the lows off, all the low mids off, all the highs off. Then he'd pick up the microphone with his right hand and extended his left arm. The closer the microphone got to his mouth the more the audience was screaming. His voice echoed deeply, and he sounded like a younger Lee "Scratch" Perry as he went through the basic roots reggae callouts, Jah Rastafari and so on. Then he'd reached down with his left arm into his box of 45s. It was a simple thing, bending his arm to pick up a record, but it drove the crowd wild. Think Michael Jackson: that's the level of showmanship he had. He picked a record, put the B side onto the turntable, cleaned the needle, and then let it drop onto the vinyl. Because of the way he had set the board, all you heard was the upper end, a tinny, ear-piercing version of the record cl.u.s.tered around the highs. The B-side was usually the instrumental version of the song, and he'd halt it midway, turn up the high mids and then the low mids, and finish playing it that way. Then he took the record off and flipped it. Now the A side, the real song, was ready to go, and that meant that he was ready for the payoff moment, which was when his arm went to the ba.s.s. He turned that up and boom: the bottom dropped into the room, and everyone was physically jolted. I had never experienced anything like it.

And I wasn't the only one. The next day I was talking to Rich, and he had a look on his face like a new convert. "That's what we have to do," he said. "We have to be that loud. I want people to have a colonic when you guys perform."7 We tried it out at a place in Brighton. We were opening for Roy Ayers. Rich set all the levels and boom! That was the arrival of the Roots.

Since then, we've been every sound engineer's nightmare. Funk bands had dominated the seventies, but in the mid-nineties, the loudest bands were rock groups that operated mostly in the high end. They needed guitar screech. We were a low-end concern, almost entirely. I had a kick pedal. Hub played ba.s.s. Rahzel did beatboxing. And while most venues or even groups we were opening for capped our decibels at around 118, we preferred to do more like 135 or 140. It was dominating but it wasn't defeaning. The low end registers differently, somehow. It's a physical event.

London was disappointment and tension and epiphany, but it was also prelude: we were about to become real recording artists. One day, in London, Rich came to us and told us that Geffen was about to release our first single, "Distortion to Static." The next week, he came back and updated the story. "Distortion to Static" had been released, along with two other singles cut: "Flava in Ya Ear" by Craig Mack and "Juicy" by the Notorious B.I.G. The way it works is that you're looking for adds: you see how many college stations add the song to their rotation, and then you see how many commercial stations add it. The first reports were back and, Rich told us, we were in first place, beating both Craig Mack and Biggie.

We were dancing. Break out the steak!

What we didn't know, though, was that the numbers were skewed. The real release date for those two other songs was a week after ours, but because they were so highly antic.i.p.ated, they were being added early. So we were first only because our full week was slightly better than a single day of action for Craig Mack or Biggie.

Put the steak away. Break out the tissues.

As it turned out, they got something like 250 adds and we had around sixteen. We told Geffen to hold the record, that it wasn't ready, that we needed to do more promotion.

And that's when the h.e.l.l began. We returned to the States to promote it. One of the first trips was to a mom-and-pop store in Florida. We couldn't all go, only Tariq and Malik and Rich. They arrived to find that no one knew who they were. No one from the label had done advance work and prepared the store. On the way back, they stopped at a club in North Carolina, and Rich slipped the club owner a copy of our single for the DJ. There were a hundred people on the floor, dancing, having fun, but the second "Distortion to Static" came on over the speakers, the whole place just cleared. There was only one girl left, out there on her own, trying, unsuccessfully, to dance to it. Tariq looked at Rich, panic in his eyes. "We're going to f.u.c.king fail!" he said. I only heard about it later, on the telephone (a dreadful conversation that I recorded and would, fourteen years later, use as the opening of our Rising Dawn alb.u.m), but to this day I can't play the Roots in one of my own DJ sets. The memory of that empty floor is too traumatic.

The second half of 1994, as we waited for our first alb.u.m to drop and tried to calculate how much fame, if any, it might bring us, remains one of the most instructive periods of my entire career, though it wasn't always instructive in a good way. Thing was, we had expectations, and that was a problem. I took every failure personally and every imperfect experience as a failure, so every time another artist hit the big time with a magazine cover or a top video, it was like an arrow in my side. You hear so much about the tortoise and the hare, and the beauty of that story is that the hare is always going to come smoking out of the gate, but you know that eventually you're going to see his car set up on the side of the road as the tortoise moseys past on the way to the finish line. But what if you're the tortoise and you keep being pa.s.sed by other tortoises? What if the band that was signed after you becomes huge? What if the band that opens for you becomes huge?

It took me a few years to come to terms with the notion that we were always going to be bridesmaids. Even now, I wonder what would have happened if it had gone differently. Rich and I have this idea about "The Bentley Moment," which is that beyond-your-wildest-dreams Hype-Williams-video-type experience, the ticker tape parade, the money raining down from the sky. Without that, have you made it as an artist? What is success? All I knew back then was that we weren't having it yet, and that I wanted it.8 Just as my life as a recording artist was getting underway, my cushy home life exploded. When we signed to Geffen, we had a party to celebrate the deal. It was a celebration and then some. Everyone's mouths dropped when we came into the room. Tariq was wearing a $3,000 leather jacket. We played a great set. As a favor to my former employer, Ruffhouse, I promised that these young upstarts from New Jersey could play at our record release party in 1993. That group was the Fugees. Their approach at that time was more acoustic soul than hip-hop, exactly; they just had a guitar and some drums. That night, we recorded a triumphant live version of "Essaywhuman?!!!??!" that would appear on Do You Want More?!!!??! Also that night, just before I went on stage, my mother told me that she had made the decision to leave my father.

The news. .h.i.t me like a sledgehammer. I grew up protected, privileged, whatever word you want to use. My home life had been so stable that it was the envy of most of the people I knew. But that doesn't mean that there weren't problems. At some point in my late teens, my father's personality began to change, triggered in part by financial disappointments, in part by creative frustrations, in part by fear of his own middle age, and then accelerated by a thousand other things I couldn't fathom at the time and that I probably still understand only vaguely. My father hadn't had an easy life. He wasn't encouraged to sing by his family; they saw music as an instrument of the devil. He was one of eight kids, and the darkest, and since that generation was subject to the paper-bag test-if you're darker than a paper bag, you're treated badly-he was beaten the most, abused the most, punished the most. He dropped out of school early, and there was a real possibility that he could have been lost. But he had singing talent and drive and Denzellian matinee-idol good looks, and when he became a famous singer in Philadelphia, projecting that image became central to his personality. All he ever wore were suits. He felt such intense pressure to maintain that pose, to be handsome and debonair. But at the same time, he was starting to feel hollow inside. It wasn't clear to him that he deserved what he had, or if he'd be able to keep it. Take his relationship with my mother, for example. She was beautiful, and that made him angry and controlling, which in turn made her feel like she had to mask her beauty to keep him feeling okay about himself. It was a bad dynamic that got worse as he got older.

That insecurity spilled over to the way he treated his kids. My sister wanted to act, but she ended up in the family band instead, partly because my father controlled everyone with such a tight grip. I felt it firsthand. After I got my advance for Do You Want More?!!!??!, my father came to me and told me that I owed him. I was confused. "You owe me," he said, "for all those years in private school, all those lessons. I sacrificed for you. I want a cut." I gave him the money, but it broke my mom's heart to see me handing it over. She thought that a father was just supposed to do those things for a child without asking for something in return.

The beginning of the end happened in the mid-eighties, and it went slowly downhill. Then in 1993, the night of our party celebrating our Geffen signing, my mother told me that she had made the decision to stick up for herself. "If I don't," she said, "and if you see me take what I think is coming next, which might be hitting, then you're going to do the same thing with your wife, and that's not something I'm willing to let happen."

The week she escaped was like an espionage movie. It was a very slow, calculated process. She smuggled out one bag of clothes a day to my sister's house until the closet was empty, and then one morning a routine visit to the gym instead turned into a train trip to North Carolina, where she went to live with family. She left a note and I had to act all surprised when my father found it: "Ahmir! Your mother!"

I looked as shocked as I could.

At that point, it was just the two of us in the house, me and my father. Believe it or not, that was another revelation. When my father found my mother's note, I was ready for whatever was coming: blame, rage, shouting, a violent outburst. But it was the opposite. He became a sh.e.l.l of a man. He slumped down into a chair and made a noise like there was nothing left in him, and then he started to cry. I had never seen that happen before. In a strange way, it made me angry. I wouldn't say that my father was abusive, exactly, but he had a stage-father pathology and a stern personality. He was Joe Jackson, in some small sense. And then, all of a sudden, the curtain pulled back, and he was the Wizard of Oz. It became clear to me that he kept people under his control so he didn't have to admit to himself that he was scared. My mother left and it just all went out of him.

My reaction was related, maybe: I threw myself into my work. People always ask me how I have time to develop my sound. I set up one drum set and try it that way, then go to EQ b.u.t.tons and try it a different way. When I describe the process, it sounds like a nineteen-hour commitment just to get the right settings for a single song, and it sounds that way because it is that way. It started that way after the first alb.u.m, when I was avoiding home. The studio was an escape but also a necessary safe place for me.

We had turned in the finished tapes of our debut in April 1994, expecting to see the record by "the 28th of June," but we weren't ready, and then we thought the material wasn't ready. Finally, on January 17, 1995-the same day as the Great Hanshin earthquake in Kobe, j.a.pan, and three days before my twenty-fourth birthday-Do You Want More?!!!??! was released. We went on The Jon Stewart Show to promote it, beginning a friendship with Jon that lasts to this day, even though we're now on a competing late-night show.

Mobb Deep came to our in-store signing at Tower Records in Philly to promote their new single, "Shook Ones Part I," and we said h.e.l.lo to them and they said h.e.l.lo to us, but that was the extent of our fame in that first week. It was a great time for hip-hop; unfortunately, the reason it was so great wasn't princ.i.p.ally about us, or even our record. It was about one of the other new songs that came out at the same time, Ol' Dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d's "Brooklyn Zoo," which was a song that was so radical that it changed the way I thought about hip-hop. The way that song is structured, for starters, is bananas: just an intro, one extended verse, and then the chorus, which is repeated into infinity. And the vocals are spoken, or shouted, with amazing phrasing and total confidence in their own effects. It's like Screamin' Jay Hawkins somehow made the best hip-hop single in history.

As the weeks went on, the sense of anticlimax only deepened. In fact, the experience of having an alb.u.m out was absolutely devastating. In my head, when I replayed our record next to other records that I loved, I was convinced that we were in the company of other cla.s.sics. De La Soul's 3 Feet High and Rising was such a creative record and the world ate it up. A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory was such a creative record and the world ate it up. But there was one thing both of those alb.u.ms had that we lacked, and that was a hit single. If you were De La Soul, you could talk all you wanted about your commitment to artistry and pushing the boundaries of the genre, but the fact was that "Me Myself and I" was a gold single, and it moved the record along. It was the same thing with Tribe's "Scenario." The Roots didn't have that.

In fact, I wasn't sure what we had. Those first few months of being a recording artist were one disappointment after another. Even before it was released, half the band had visited the record store in Florida only to discover that Geffen's advance team had stranded us. Then there was the incident in North Carolina where the dance floor cleared.9 That sense of failure continued on into 1995. We played shows in Europe where there was more waitstaff than fans. In Berlin, we drew only seven people. In Austria, we were hara.s.sed by the cops at the airport, even though we hadn't done anything wrong. There was a night where Hub got fed up with the sense of futility and lashed out at the audience-not in any Jim Morrisontype way, thankfully, but just enough for us to get a sense of his frustration. Many nights after a show I got back to the dressing room or hotel room and wondered what I thought I was doing. Even when we came back from Europe, it was a nightmare. We had been promised tour support and we got some, going out with the Beastie Boys and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.10 We played so loud that we demanded notice. But the commercial failure of that first record escalated the existing tensions in the band.

And yet there was no giving up. I had nowhere else to turn. I was too far gone from school, past high school graduation but unconvinced that I could find my way back to the right college experience. I had no specific skill that I could trade on. My father's dream of my becoming a professional session musician had grown faint to the point of invisibility. He used to tell me to get a "real" job-as if having a record deal wasn't enough-but I wasn't sure anymore what that really meant. The Roots had to work. It was all I had. Rich calmed me down, like he had before and like he would again. "Stay the course," he said. "Don't worry. It'll work out." He reminded me that Geffen had promised to support us through the first few alb.u.ms, even when the going got rough. "We're in that period," he said. "Let them support us."

It was hard for me to believe that we would be taken care of, but I put my trust in Geffen because Rich put his trust in them, and I put my trust in Rich.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

From: Ben Greenman [cowriter]

To: Ben Greenberg [editor]

Re: The Circle Game

Did you get that note from Rich, the one where he talked about the Petrashevsky Circle and then went off on a tangent about how today's big artists are embarra.s.sing the notion of Big Artists by only selling fifty thousand copies of their highly touted records, which surface one week only to slink out of sight the next? Started me thinking on some things to discuss with Ahmir. What is the purpose of making new art? Why does Ahmir keep doing it at this point? What ideas recharge him? And even if he manages to get recharged, where is he directing his energy? I was around, as a record buyer, as a fan, when hip-hop started. It was all so new and so much of it shone. But over the years, I have found myself less and less able to find that shine in new music. People say that it's the fault of that new music, that it's responding to different market factors, that there's not the same common language and community, and maybe that's true to some degree. But it's also my fault, and yours. At this point, I have a storehouse of records to go back to, and they sustain me. If I need another hit of It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back or Paid in Full or The Slim Shady LP, all I need to do is get the CD out of the cabinet (or, more accurately and more disconcertingly, just search for the songs in my iTunes library). So what is the value, even the marginal value, of new music? I suppose you could ask this question about any form of art, but I have a vested interest in not asking it most of the time. When I write fiction, I don't worry about whether the novel I'm working on is similar to other existing novels or whether a reader would be just as well served going to a library archive as to the bookstore. I write things because I want to get to the point where I have written things. And yet, if I let my guard down, those other questions are quickly there, wolves at the door. How much does that haunt Ahmir as he moves forward as an artist? How does he get it up to make a new Roots record? And then add to that the fact that, as Rich likes to say, hip-hop carries water for all of black contemporary culture. Everything gets tagged with that adjective: fashion, food, even technology. So if the spark is dampened, if the powder can't get lit, where does that leave everyone? I'll talk to Ahmir about all that.