Been 5 years since Questlove's "Creative Quest" book was published. It didn't make too much noise from what I remember. It seems "a-ight" some okay stuff about Questlove's experiences and advice.

but...

The part about Questlove and D'Angelo debating the value of the Childish Gambino album "Awaken my love" seems kinda "touchy subject"

D'Angelo is pretty private and Quest is going in on analyzing D'Angelo's response (and detailing D'Angelo's response to "Awaken my love")

p 264 - 266

...From the second I put the new Childish Gambino record on, I was shocked. It was late at night, or what other people call early in the morning. I immediately called D'Angelo. "D," I said. "You have to hear this. It's the train."

He knew what I meant. Only a few other people would have. But now everyone can know. When I was young and I was taking the train around Philadelphia, I would have strange thoughts about the trains arriving at the platform....As I got older, I started to turn that into a metaphor for art. If the Roots put out an album right on the cutting edge of jazz and hip-hop, we could enjoy it for a moment. We were the only kid on the platform. But there was always another train about fifty yards behind us. We couldn't turn to make sure, because it could be the last thing we'd ever see. We had to keep going, keep making things, stay creative, stay challenged.

The reason I called D'Angelo was because of his own music. His own great music, I should say - Voodoo was a genuine masterpiece, and then he took some time (this is called artful understatement) to deliver Black Messiah, his follow-up. When it finally appeared at the end of 2014, it was everything everyone thought it would be. It did amazing things bringing old funk and soul into a new age, keeping the spirit of that music alive but also keeping it pushing forward. There was nothing like it. Or was there? D'Angelo thought he was the only one on the train track, and I was right there with him. In our heads, we were the only ones on that track. But when I heard the Childish Gambino record two years later, I knew we were wrong. We had been camping on the track so long, operating under that false belief, and suddenly I realized there was a twenty-ton locomotive coming at us....No artist of his size, of his prominence, was working with the same ingredients in the same way....But it was also a lesson in competition.

I had lot's of arguments about that record, that night and in the days to come, with D'Angelo. One interesting one, at least for the purposes of that discussion, originated with the idea of influence, and it returns to some of the concepts I discussed at the beginning of this chapter. D'Angelo asked me if I thought the record was derivative. Of course it was, and I said so. But I also asked him why he thought he had the right to soak everything up, from Smokey Robinson to Marvin Gaye to Curtis Mayfield to Prince, and remake it in his own image, while Childish Gambino didn't. It all came down to time frame. In D'Angelo's mind, he was drawing on oldies, but oldies that were acquired legitimately, on the radio, in his own record collection, whereas Childish Gambino was wearing them like fashion. In my mind, that's not a good argument. You don't pick where your inspiration comes from, or where your competition comes from. You are inspired by and compete with things that matter to you. Sometimes they come to you across the decades. And then there's the funny second implication in what D'Angelo was saying. He was suggesting that Childish Gambino was also, in some sense, copying him, that he was using the same set of moves to reach his audience. I told D'Angelo that I agreed with him - but he had to realize that he was an oldies act, too. That was something he didn't like to hear. But I asked him to look at the calendar. His debut album was more than twenty years old......

Poll result (14 votes) Nah....just telling what happened (12 votes) Vote yeah, not supposed to reveal D critiquing another artist (2 votes) Vote