While documentaries with Elton John, Bono, Dua Lipa and Céline Dion had to settle for single Emmy nominations, and Bruce Springsteen’s doc was shut out entirely, musician and filmmaker Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson became one of the small group of this year’s triple Emmy nominees. And while most of his fellow triple nominees racked up all of their noms on the same show – Stephen Graham for writing, producing and acting in “Adolescence,” Quinta Brunson for doing the same three things on “Abbott Elementary – Thompson got his trifecta for doing three different jobs on three different programs.
He received one nomination for producing “Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius),” an alternately exhilarating and wrenching look at the protean funk musician Sly Stone, who took his music to the heights and then was destroyed by the excess that came with success; another for serving as co-music director of “SNL50: The Homecoming Concert,” the Peacock special drawn from the 50th anniversary of “Saturday Night Live”; and the third for Outstanding Directing for a Documentary/Nonfiction Program for another “SNL” special, “Ladies and Gentlemen … 50 Years of SNL Music,” a two-hour tribute to the musical artists who have performed on the long-running late-night comedy show.
A drummer, DJ, writer, producer, professor, bandleader and filmmaker who has spent more than 30 years leading The Roots — 16 of those as the house band on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” — Thompson got into directing with the 2022 documentary “Summer of Soul (…Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised),” which won him the Academy Award for Best Documentary. In its aftermath, he received lots of offers for different projects and wound up working simultaneously on “Sly Lives!” and “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
That last project opens with what might be the most invigorating seven-and-a-half minutes on TV this past Emmy season. Beginning with an array of “SNL” hosts introducing their episode’s musical guests, it turns into a wildly eclectic mashup that merges Taylor Swift and Billy Preston, Run-DMC and Hall and Oates, Rick James and Duran Duran … Lots of people might have the idea to intercut Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” with Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby,” which samples the earlier song’s bassline; maybe only Questlove would think to throw Dave Matthews, Fine Young Cannibals and Michael Bolton (!) in there as well.
The mashup, which probably uses close to 100 different performances (I lost count a few minutes in), is an insane history lesson with a killer backbeat, so we asked Thompson how he did it. At one point, he pulled out his phone and showed his database with scores for every “SNL” performance.
We’ll let him tell it in his own words from here.
The Beginning
“There’s this one site totally dedicated to just the introductions. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ and then the artist. So it’s like Patrick Stewart saying, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Salt-n-Pepa!’ So I was like, ‘Wow, I wonder if I can start this thing off with just a super mix of a bunch of ‘Ladies and gentlemens.”’
“Having been at ‘The Tonight Show’ for 16 years, I know the game when it comes to music clearances, because of walk-on songs and all that stuff. Like, the first time I got in trouble with 30 Rock (NBC) was because I didn’t clear the one-note sting from ‘Law & Order: SVU.’ It literally is a registered song.”
“I already knew that I had my dream version of what I’d like to do, but there’s no way in hell that’s gonna happen. So I did the safest version, almost the flattest version of that. It was just like, let me just go through time. Let me grab Gil Scott-Heron, and I’ll grab something from ’79 and something from ’80, and maybe I’ll just move every five years.”
“But John MacDonald, my editor, we’re like twins. We grew up sort of in that Bomb Squad, Public Enemy mode. And there’s a duo from Australia called The Avalanches. They did a record called ‘Since I Left You’ with 4,000 samples from TV, movie music … I had interviewed them on my podcast and they told me that they cleared everything. They had three or four music clearers.”
“I was like, ‘How did you get away with it? How did you explain it? How did you get to past the red tape of ‘You used my song, I want $19,000?’ They said they explained to people that it was like an art project – and once people saw it as an art project, and not just like someone’s stealing my music to make their No. 1 rap song, then all of a sudden it was like, ‘Yeah, that’s kind of cool. I wanna be a part of this.’”
“After that, John convinced me to do this for real. He’s like, ‘Man, let’s just do it first, and make it so great that they’re bound to clear it.’ And I was like, ‘All right, let’s do this.’”
The Process
“The way that we structured it, I joke that this is my ‘CSI’ crime board, with pictures and pieces of yarn connecting them and all that stuff. I went through every song ever performed on the show, be it in a sketch or a musical performance. And for every song, I took a note on my phone and gave it a score. If it was a perfect performance, it got 5. It were notable, I gave it 4. All the fast songs, all the slow songs, all the different genres.”
“I went through about three to seven episodes a day for an entire year. And then, because I think like a DJ, I would think, ‘This song’s 112 BPMs and it’s E flat minor, but the bridge is in G and that way we can connect to the next song.’”
“It’s how I construct a DJ gig. And then when we had a good five minutes, I was like, ‘Wait. Before we do any more, I don’t want them to be like, ‘This is impossible to clear.’ Let me show them first.’ So I played it for NBC and their jaws dropped. I said, ‘Guys, what do you think? Is this gonna be a clearance nightmare?’ And they were like, ‘It absolutely is gonna be a clearance nightmare. But just do it as you see fit.’”
“But I was talking about doing a 14-minute thing, and they said, ‘14 minutes is a lot, so try to whittle this down to seven minutes.’ I was like, ‘Seven?!’ In my mind, it should be 16 minutes. But let’s not bore people. Seven minutes is fine.”
The Clearance Nightmare
“So we did a good seven minutes, and they were like, ‘Well, good news and bad news.’ ‘Just gimme the bad news.’ ‘Well, 24 songs did not clear.’”
“And I was like, ‘Show me the songs.’ They showed me the list, and I said, ‘Oh, I have this guy’s number, I have this number … Dude, gimme a month.’”
“For a few people, I had to physically fly out and show them. They were like, ‘Wait, you flew all the way out for this?‘”
“I physically showed them the thing and put it in context. I was like, ‘Dude, this is history. This thing’s gonna be here forever long after we’re gone, and I don’t think anyone’s doing this again.’ They were like, ‘Yeah, you’re right.’”
The One That Got Away
“That’s how we were able to clear everything, with the exception of Pavarotti. There’s a brilliant moment where Pavarotti is doing something with Mary J. Blige. The only thing I couldn’t get. And if I had access to the estate to just say, ‘Look, it’s just two seconds…’”
The Happy Place
“I was doing this on the weekends at the same time that I was doing the Sly Stone movie, so all week I was taking in that pain and that darkness. After three months of that, I couldn’t wait for Thursday and Friday and Saturday so I could work on ‘SNL’ and just do something fun. For me, it was my happy place. I needed it to get away from the pain.”
