Quest Lovin'

Touré interviews Ahmir Thompson aka Questlove, the music man powering the Roots, in the Believer. Good shit man. Packed with hip hop knowledge...

Here is Quest on sampling and copyright:

My life's goal is to find a happy medium for sampling to be not only legal but for the right parties to benefit from it. There have to be sampling laws. The survival of hiphop is based on that. Just make it legal and have an actual scaled rate for it. I mean, Pete Rock is wasting some of the best years of his life right now because he's being handicapped because he can't sample. It's way too expensive. The reason why Jay-Z was able to make The Blueprint [filled with great soul samples] is because the motherfucker's got a $2 million recording budget. He could pay for samples like that.

So true on Pete Rock, knew a kid, a beat junkie, who had a spot up in the Bronx that no one knew about. Chock full of samples no one knew about. He'd roll buy and spend whatever he had. One day he goes to the shop and its empty. Owner's like "yeah some guy name Pete Rock came by and bought the whole store". True? Probably. Copyright is hindering a whole genre (or several really), so much music ready to be made if the copyright laws where just loosened up...

Anyway, the interview is hot, skip too it y'all.

[via Move the Crowd: ?uestlove Breaks it Down]