More people should know Questlove by name. As the co-bandleader of The Roots alongside Black Thought, who have spent several years as the house band for The Tonight Show, he’s arguably more visible now than he and his crew have ever been before. But beyond their reliability as a musical act, these guys deserve all the credit in the world for being the greatest hip-hop band (not group, band) of all time. And Questlove is a big part of that, as not only did his production work help define the group’s jam-jazz aesthetic, but his drum work makes for some of the hardest shit ever put on wax, even considering how percussion-focused a lot of hip-hop is. And with his feature-length debut here as director, he is also shining a light on a unfairly underrated aspect of Black music and culture, with a retrospective of 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival.
Just from the line-up of talent that took to that stage, this documentary’s need to exist makes itself quite evident: Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, the 5th Dimension, Gladys Knight, Nina goddamn Simone? Hearing this amazing funk, soul, even some Latin jazz, set to the fantastically-restored footage of the performances themselves felt like it was adding years to my lifespan just witnessing it. And interspersed with the performances, Questlove and editor Joshua L. Pearson go all-out in imbuing the music with the context surrounding it, using news clips and both old and new interview footage from artists, historians, and even people who attended the festival back in the day, to reaffirm why the idea that all this rapture was left to collect dust in a basement for fifty years was such a damn shame.
Of course, the reasons why this festival lingered in pop culture obscurity for as long as it did, while that other big-name music festival from 1969 went on to garner all manner of public exposure and attention, are made loud and clear. And funnily enough, those reasons align with why this festival was such a necessity at the time to begin with: The contemporaneous state of the Black American experience. Martin Luther King had been killed the year prior, Malcolm X a few years before that, the Vietnam War was in full swing, and all manner of divisions were threatening to tear the neighbourhood apart. Light-skin vs. dark-skin, non-violence vs. by any means necessary, rich vs. poor, white music vs. Black music; unity was needed.
And with all these artists blending so many facets of musical genres and real-world politique into their art, Tony Lawrence pulled every connection he had (and even every connection he didn’t have yet) to provide that chance for unity. That soul-lifting display of Zulu Love that would affirm that every one of the 300,000 attendees were Black and Beautiful, and that both of those aspects of their being should be celebrated, not relegated to the background. It’s the kind of scenario that makes a documentary production into something that needs to exist, and just from watching this, I felt awash in the sensation that everyone who had a hand in making this happen, from the concert performers to the interviewees to Questlove himself, wanted to keep this moment crystalised and recorded for posterity. Because such moments deserve to be preserved.
Once again, I will admit to being an outsider looking in when it comes my perspective on this story, as a white suburban teenager-in-a-grown-man’s-body from Australia isn’t in any position to talk about what is or what isn’t uplifting for Black Americans. But I am absolutely fine with that position, as this is ultimately all about what this event means for them more so than myself. My own appreciation for Black culture comes mainly from my lifelong love of hip-hop culture, and I’ve always maintained that that love would be insultingly surface-level if I didn’t honour that which paved the way for it in turn. And through that lens, seeing something this joyous, yet so unfairly left by the wayside until recently, makes me happy knowing that there are many people out there who will be even happier basking in this film’s glory.
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