The Roots drummer, DJ, author and director is the ‘Ken Burns of black music’, and his personal reflections on a genre that last year turned 50 are full of wisdom and charm

Hip-hop officially turned 50 last year. It is generally accepted that it was born on 11 August 1973, when 18-year-old DJ Kool Herc first cut up breakbeats at a party in the Bronx and his friend Coke La Rock rapped along, but this DJ-driven art form, which evolved parallel to disco, took another six years to spawn its first hit single, the Sugarhill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. The star MCs emerged in its second decade, each one redrawing the bounds of the possible. Run-DMC stripped it down, then Public Enemy blew it up. De La Soul made it friendly, Kool Keith made it freaky, NWA made it outrageous, and so on. Always changing, always expanding.

Nobody knows more about hip-hop, and perhaps popular music in general, than Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson. Still drumming with the Roots, the Philadelphia hip-hop crew that have been Jimmy Fallon’s TV house band since 2009, he is also the Oscar-winning director of Summer of Soul , a prolific author, podcaster and DJ, and the man tasked with herding cats for the Grammys’ salute to hip-hop at 50. Two years older than the art form itself, he has become its unofficial curator, the Ken Burns of black music, the nerd’s nerd. “History is how change gets marked and assessed,” he writes in his eighth book. “It’s a communal form of memory and a collective acknowledgment that what we remember matters.”

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His new song Houdini is set to be the fastest-selling single of the year, eclipsing even Taylor Swift – despite being ignored by rap fans and radio stations alike

Last Friday, Eminem released his 62nd single, Houdini. Reviews were lukewarm to woeful. “Eminem loses the magic,” ran the headline in the New York Times, while website Stereogum went for the more straightforward “Eminem’s New Song ‘Houdini’ Is Really, Really Bad”, criticising everything from the “stilted” rapping to a lyrical joke about the incident when Megan Thee Stallion was shot in the foot by her fellow rapper Tory Lanez.

The public’s response was quite the opposite. A week on, it is the most-streamed song in the UK and guaranteed to become Eminem’s 11th UK No 1. It is both his fastest-selling single in 22 years, and on track to become the UK’s fastest-selling single of the year by anyone, including Taylor Swift.

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(Stones Throw)
The producer-singer duo’s sweet nostalgia-funk now has a sour vibe as Paak switches between anger and self-pity

While the second outing for Anderson .Paak and Knxwledge’s two-man supergroup NxWorries recaptures the soft-edged nostalgia-funk sound of their 2016 debut Yes Lawd!, the lyrical vibe is much darker and more uncertain. It’s Paak’s first album since splitting from Jaylyn Chang , his wife of 13 years and mother of his two children, and the singer/rapper is deep in the slough of divorcee despondency – wildly switching moods between anger, self-pity and desperate horniness.

Why Lawd? plays like a 21st-century update of Here, My Dear, Marvin Gaye’s notoriously bitter farewell to ex-wife Anna Gordy. But while Paak’s leathery, weathered vocal is soulful, he is an unlikable narrator. He is adept at charting his own heartache, moaning “I can’t do the same things I used to do” on MoveOn. But it’s harder to empathise with his whining about prenups, his snarls of “Bitch, you supposed to be with me” (KeepHer), and his calling his new girl a “dumb bitch” as he fumes over his ex’s social media activity. Paak’s ugly spite quickly wears out its welcome – even his mum sounds bored of her offspring’s sour self-pity on MoreOfIt.

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As the esteemed rapper releases a new album and publishes memoir Rise of a Killah, he’ll be taking on your questions

Melodious, blaring and irresistibly confident, Ghostface Killah doesn’t just have one of the best flows in Wu-Tang Clan, but one of the best in US rap full stop. And as he publishes a memoir, Rise of a Killah, and releases new album Set the Tone (Guns & Roses), he’ll be taking on your questions.

Born Dennis Coles in 1970 in Staten Island, New York, Ghostface grew up in poverty with a single mother: “Fifteen of us in a three bedroom apartment, roaches everywhere,” as the autobiographical track All That I Got Is You would later have it. He went to prison for robbery aged 15, but after falling in with Robert Diggs, known as RZA, co-founded Wu-Tang Clan – it’s Ghostface’s voice ringing out on the first verse of side one, track one of their 1993 debut album Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers).

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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?

With a sigh, Ahmir Thompson – better known as Questlove – turns his laptop around, so I can see the inside of his apartment, rather than the beautiful view of the New York skyline through the window behind him. It is a chaos of overflowing boxes and furniture covered with papers. “An ex-publicist of mine decided that they didn’t need their 8x10 photographs and old articles from the NME any more, so they gifted them to me,” he shrugs.

Thompson seems equivocal about this state of affairs. On the one hand, he can barely contain his delight: “Look at this!” he enthuses, showing me a newly acquired invite to the 1984 premiere of Prince’s Purple Rain movie. But, on the other: well, look at the place. “People are saying: ‘I got kids, but they won’t care about this stuff like you will. If this needs to go in a museum or something, I can trust you with history.’ The universe has put me in the position of keeper of the record. So, you know, be careful what you wish for.”

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Incident comes the day after a shooting outside the rapper’s home in which a security guard was seriously injured

A man has been arrested after trying to gain access to Drake’s Toronto mansion, the day after a security guard at the property was seriously injured in a shooting .

“Officers were called after a person attempted to gain access to the property,” Toronto police said in a statement. “The person was apprehended under the Mental Health Act, and they were taken to receive medical attention.”

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Drake says ‘I feel disgusted’ by allegations, as enmity between rap superstars deepens following weekend flurry of diss tracks

Drake has denied allegations of child sex offences and of him harbouring a secret child, both levelled at him by Kendrick Lamar in recent days.

The enmity between the rap superstars has escalated over a series of diss tracks in the past few weeks, culminating in a flurry of activity during the weekend with three tracks by Lamar and two by Drake.

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Le rappeur canadien Drake a publié une chanson utilisant une fausse voix de Tupac. Il a fait de même avec Snoop Dogg. Sous la menace de représailles judiciaires, il a fini par retirer son titre, qui attaquait son rival Kendrick Lamar.

Empire Polo Club, Indio, California

Festival headliner delivered an A-game set, ignoring some of her mainstream hits yet bringing enough energy to power what some have called a middling year

Doja Cat took the Coachella mainstage as the last official act to perform on Sunday’s bill, becoming the first female rapper to headline the festival. (She’s also only the second Black woman to do so, after Beyoncé in 2018) Her closer rounded out a Sunday showcase of powerhouse female performers such as Renée Rapp and Kesha duetting the recession banger TiK ToK – changing the opening line to “wake up in the morning saying fuck P Diddy” – and Victoria Monet grinding through a slick and ultra-sexy set, at one point receiving artfully-simulated oral sex from a background dancer.

It would be diplomatic to say that Doja maintains a distant relationship with her fans, who call themselves kittenz, though their fave does not sanction this moniker. Doja’s told those who engage in parasocial relationships with the idea of her to “get off your phone and get a job” and “rethink everything” about their lives. Such boundary-setting has cost her some Instagram followers – around 300,000, to be exact, after going off on them in a social media tirade – but she could care less. “I feel free,” she wrote in an Instagram story after the snafu last year.

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