He’d never heard a drumbeat so inconsistent in a rap song, a genre of music made on machines, all with dependable digital clocks. It would appear on the “one” and then not show up when he expected it to hit on the “three.” Instead, it would pop into view in irregular places, not places that felt familiar or safe to a drummer, the musician most responsible for delivering a stable, dependable pulse. The weirdest part was the kick: the drum sound played with the foot to carry that “stomping” downbeat.

Each clap sounded like a book falling down onto its side just after being set upright on a shelf. The claps, which should have carried that steady backbeat, slid into place just slightly after he expected to hear them.

Outside that North Carolina nightclub, what Questlove heard was different. So it sounds something like this: STOMP-clap!-STOMP-clap! In modern popular music, we tend to stomp our feet on beats one and three (the downbeat), and clap our hands on beats two and four (the backbeat). But in that rhythm, the back-and-forth of the one and two stays well defined. Most often, we count in “measures” or “bars” of fours: one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. The common rhythm of our popular music is counted in multiples of either two or three. The indivisible number of rhythm is two, for it is the space between the first and second beat that sets our musical expectations and tells us when to expect the third, and so on. Thus all music begins with the second event.

One sound-whether the bang of a drum or a note struck on a piano or a bird’s chirp-doesn’t become music until a second sound occurs either at the same time, called harmony or at another moment in time, called melody the ordered spacing of those sounds in time called rhythm.

What was Questlove expecting to hear? What all who listen to popular music expect: a steady beat. As the beats from the club drifted out into the parking lot, Questlove asked the driver to wait. But on this evening in 1994, outside a small North Carolina venue, he was an unknown.Īfter the Roots’ performance, Questlove settled into a car, en route to an interview at a nearby college radio station, while the headliners, the Pharcyde, took the stage for their set. The world would later come to know him as Questlove. The Roots’ twenty-three-year-old drummer, Ahmir Thompson, was their de facto leader, with his trademark afro their de facto logo. Twenty years before the Roots became the house band for NBC’s The Tonight Show in 2014-placing them at the epicenter of the American cultural mainstream-they were an obscure hip-hop act promoting their first album on the road, opening for only slightly less obscure hip-hop acts.

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