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‘Rapper’s Delight planted a seed for the rest of my life’: Questlove on hoarding, capturing hip-hop history and the Kendrick-Drake beef

The drummer, DJ and Oscar-winning director is a key custodian of Black culture, with 200,000 records to prove it. So why does he think he’s getting too old for rap music?

There is the Roots’ five-nights-a-week gig as the house band on Jimmy Fallon’s talkshow, a role they’ve held since 2009 (although they were nearly fired early on for playing an instrumental version of Fishbone’s Lyin’ Ass Bitch as walk-on music for right-wing politician Michele Bachmann). One is rumoured to be a live-action remake of Disney classic The Aristocats, but the only one he’s allowed to discuss is a nearly completed documentary about Sly Stone, “a 20,000-piece puzzle that took a lot of meticulous tightrope-walking to put together”, that delves not just into his music, but his capacity for self-sabotage. Co-written with his regular literary collaborator Ben Greenman, Hip-Hop Is History melds a detailed chronological retelling of the genre’s story with occasionally hair-raising memoir, recalling the likes of the 1995 Source Awards, when the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that eventually claimed the lives of Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls first erupted into public view and the Roots found themselves uncomfortably seated directly between the two warring factions.

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