With musician parents, Questlove grew up in Philadelphia surrounded by a collection of, he estimates, five thousand vinyl LPs. Drums began at age two, and he can tell you what song was spinning (Curtis Mayfield’s “Freddie’s Dead”) as he burned himself on the radiator. As a teen, he scraped together the money to buy Prince’s 1999 eight times, because his parents kept confiscating it for its raunchiness. He was an immediate casualty of the Sugarhill Gang’s 1979 hit song “Rapper’s Delight,” recalling that for black kids “it was our equivalent of the old radio drama War of the Worlds.” But he also posits a less conventional turning point for hip hop: an episode of The Cosby Show when Stevie Wonder’s driver crashes and the audience gets to see a sampler, that piece of recording hardware that would become integral to the music’s production.

Thus formed in childhood, Questlove was a natural sponge for the extraordinary variety of music that was emerging in the Nineties. There’s a 1993 car trip during which Questlove hears for the first time Midnight Marauders by A Tribe Called Quest together with The Wu-Tang Clan’s raw, blindsiding debut; he calls it “the greatest day ever.” At another point, while Questlove is abroad on tour, a friend plays him a snippet of the first album of the underground Detroit group Slum Village through the phone; hearing it, Questlove asks that more be fed into his hotel answering machine, which he then proceeded to listen to for three hours.