Questlove’s Digital Memoir
Humanizing What We Idolize
2010-07-29
By Robin Caldwell
Special: BlackWeb 2.0 Guest Edits Ebony.com
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We live in a culture that has enabled
people to believe they know celebrities based on gossip blogs, tweets and
status updates. The things we think we know have been filtered through rumor
mills, taken out of context and embellished by people 1,000 degrees separated
from the celebrity in question.
The Roots drummer and Jimmy Fallon’s
bandleader, Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson humanizes what we idolize: stardom and
celebrity culture. The stories on the site are as crudely written as they are
presented, yet there isn’t anything crude about the entries or the way
?uestlove recounts his-stories.
Questlove’s Celebrity Stories is housed on Hypnagogics,
a site owned by Kenan M. Banks, a web designer and programmer.
Kenan took the original stories, which were posted on OkayPlayer.com’s message
boards, and created a platform for them on Hypnagogics. In fact, he designed
it.
In an email, Kenan wrote me,
The original post can be
found here, but note that it is VERY large and may break your browser:
http://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=18&topic_id=131953&mesg_id=131953&page=2
As that post got big
enough to break people’s browsers, I wrote a small program to scan the post for
all of ?uestlove’s replies (he posts as 15 on Okayplayer sometimes). http://hypnagogics.com/questo
is the result.
My favorite posts are
Corrine Bailey Rae “never met a sweeter person
in life. she should be off limits to diabetics only female i worked
on that wasn’t a nightmare”
Don
Cornelius “‘YOU CAN’T STAND HERE’ he voice sounded like the
jolly green giant. i moved.”
Nona Gaye “you best believe i wasted 0 time in
talking to nona and her mom. jan said yonce reminded her of marvin in the
studio with how effortless his harmony attempts were. i went the extra mile in
asking about stories about her father. we got real real cool.” (There’s
actually a lot more to this story and it is an amazing one.)
My absolute favorite was this one:
Here’s my preach: Too often we forget
that the people we fawn over and follow on social networks are flesh and blood.
Questlove’s celebrity stories could be your story or mine about the famous and
the not-so famous. But it’s the spirit that I love. He’s not name-dropping.
He’s not asserting himself as the star of the story. He also laughs at himself.
He also indicts without self-righteousness as in the case of the journalist who
ignorantly mistakes him for iconic rock drummer Buddy Miles. He’s either saying
the person didn’t know music history or that they fell to the “they all look
like” mentality. Maybe he was saying both but I love the way he says it.
Kenan said that more stories will be added due to the popularity of his site
with other celebs and ?uestlove who has even tweeted about them.
