When did hip-hop begin? Many insist that its official beginning was in 1973, at a party in the Bronx, when Clive Campbell, better known as DJ Kool Herc, began spinning two copies of a James Brown record together. Soon, emcees around the borough and then the city and then the world were mixing music in a similar fashion and began rapping over it. But others insist that the genre began much earlier—or at least that its roots did. Ahmir Thompson—better known as Questlove, the six-time Grammy-winning cofounder of the Roots—is one of them: “Herc was drawing on existing Jamaican music traditions, like toasting, where Jamaican vocalists performed over American R&B records,” he writes in his new book, Hip-Hop Is History. “But for me, [rap] also draws on traditions in Black music that stretch back at least a decade earlier….None of this should minimize Herc’s party. It’s just that hip-hop didn’t come from one place, and it didn’t go to one place. It went everywhere.” Reviewing his book for Fall Books, Bijan Stephen not only examines Questlove’s history of hip-hop but also considers Questlove’s own role in this history, the way he and the Roots helped remake rap—or at least their small corner of it—in the 1990s and 2000s, and how their own trajectory captures the way hip-hop moved from the margins into the mainstream. “Hip-hop,” Stephen explains, “is our pain turned into art: You either express it or it eventually destroys you. Questlove, of course, understands this intimately. You can feel it thrumming just beneath the surface.” Read “Questlove’s Personal History of Hip-Hop”