Break'ing, Graffiti, & DJ'ing. Being part of Hip Hop music, you must
KNOW YOUR ROOTS. If you KNOW Hip Hop, then you must have heard of The
Roots, for that matter. The Roots, the house band for Late Night with
Jimmy Fallon, is a band from Philadelphia, started by Black Thought &
?uestlove back in circa 1986/87. Questlove aka Ahmir Thompson or
"Questo" is the drummer from the legendary Roots crew. who is also a
DJ. If his day job is drummer, and DJ by night, then ?uest doesn't
have to stick to his 9 to 5, because he has skills on the 1's and 2's.
He recently spun his legendary set on a crowd at CENTRAL S.A.P.C. in
Santa Monica, CA.
Opening up for DJ ?uestlove was DJ Murphy Lawless and The Beatards, an
electro Hip Hop group from New York City. They got the crowd hyped,
and ready for the epic set put on by ?uestlove. He spun over 200 hits,
usually starting out with an original record, then transitioning into
a current hit, that sampled that original song. First song he played
"P.Y.T." (Pretty Young Thing) by the late Michael Jackson, was a major
hit song in 1983. He then proceeded to slow down the original record,
upgraded the beat, and graduated to the second song "Good Life" by
Kanye West from his 2007 platinum album Graduation, which used a
slowed down sample of Jackson "P.Y.T". The crowd went wild! This went
on for the whole night. This was more than just a DJ set, he
essentially gave crowd a lesson in Hip Hop, and he went back to the
basics with music, back to the roots.
"Hip Hop is not a spectator sport, you have to participate!!!" yelledby ?uestlove to the crowd. "No sitting on the sidelines." he demanded,
to get the audience more into his set and into what he was doing. An
hour into his it, the crowd was still bobbing and moving to his
selected songs, the well known hits from the past 25 years, to the
unknown, obscured samples a lot of the producers in Hip Hop got them
from. Overall, ?uestlove DJ'd one of the best sets I've heard in life
and the CENTRAL Social Aid and Pleasure Club in Santa Monica was a
good setting. You truly have to hear it for yourself. See him on "Late
Night with Jimmy Fallon" as the band's drummer, his day job, and
follow him on twitter @questlove to catch him doing his night job as a
DJ, to find out when and where he spins next. Also find out who's at
CENTRAL Santa Moncia @theCENTRALsapc
