Black Excellence: Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/22/nx-s1-5492391/questlove-lara-downes-interview
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is a timekeeper by profession. As a drummer, he’s the co-frontman of the Grammy-winning hip-hop band The Roots. He is also a historian, an author of books and a maker of films that illuminate the ways in which music is shaped by time and culture, and shapes it in turn. So his relationship to time exists very much in the present — as a creator of rhythmic structure, controller of tempo and catalyst of energy — but also in the past, as each drumstroke recedes immediately into the echoes of history.