The Roots of the Roots

In September 1987, Ahmir Thompson was in the principal’s office at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts sorting out an ID card. “It was my second day in public school – I was a junior,” says Thompson. “I saw a guard pulling in a kid by the ear. The kid was like, ‘You just jealous because you can’t get no pussy!’” That kid was an incoming ninth-grader named Tariq Trotter who had just been busted getting some from a ballerina in the bathroom. “No freshman ever made a mark on the second day of any high school, anywhere,” says Thompson. “But that set his legend.” Twenty years later, drummer Thompson and rapper Trotter – better known as ?uestlove and Black Thought – are the core of the Roots, one of the most enduring partnerships in hip-hop history.

‘I grew up in the neighborhood where Rocky came from,” says Trotter, referring to the hardscrabble streets of South Philly. Like the fictional fighter, Trotter has succeeded in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, including the murders of both of his parents – and the incarceration of an older brother, Keith, who Trotter estimates has spent 27 of his 42 years in prison…Trotter – known to his friends as ‘Riq – was born into a devout Muslim household. His father, Tom Trotter, was a central figure in a crew associated with the Nation of Islam known as Black Brothers Inc. The elder Trotter prayed five times a day at Malcolm X’s Mosque No. 12 but, according to his son, all was not on the up-and-up. “Some people would have just called him a mob leader – there was a whole lot of criminal activity in the name of Islam,” says Trotter, noting that his father may have been involved in extortion, grand-theft auto, credit scams, drug dealing and murder. One night in 1974, when Tariq was one, his father left the house and never came back. “Sometimes it comes back to bite you in the ass,” says Trotter. “He was executed: tied to a chair in an empty lot, shot in the neck, the chest, the groin, all over.”