By Hayden Wright
In an essay penned for Rolling Stone, the leader of and drummer for The Roots, Questlove, illustrates how Prince was a misunderstood hip-hop pioneer.
“Prince’s relationship to hip-hop has been the subject of much scrutiny, and more than a little mockery,” Quest writes. “It’s commonplace to say that he couldn’t figure out rap music, and to point to the sometimes stilted appearances of rappers on his records in the early Nineties. But at heart, he was more hip-hop than anyone.”
Related: Bruce Springsteen Pays Tribute to Prince, Opens with ‘Purple Rain’
Questlove explained that Prince’s greatest contribution to hip-hop wasn’t the cadences he used in his music, but his state of mind.
“When he was giving interviews on the regular to Cynthia Horner in Right On! magazine, he was telling tall tales left and right,” reads the essay. “That was hip-hop. He built a crew, a posse, around his look and his sense of style. That was hip-hop. He had beef (with Rick James). He had his own vanity label (Paisley Park). He had parents up in arms over the content of his songs to the point where they had to invent the Parental Advisory warning. Hip-hop, hip-hop, hip-hop.”
Quest explores other facets of Prince’s legacy in the touching essay, including how deeply he was influenced by Prince’s music as a child and how he had to buy 1999 four times because his parents repeatedly took it way claiming it was too sexual. The Roots writer also discusses the first time he met Prince and the immense impact he had on Quest’s playing style.
