In my opinion, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson is shooting perfect from the field when it comes to music documentaries. From Summer of Soul and Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, to the brilliant Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius), the legendary DJ and melophile definitely found his second calling as a filmmaker. Still riding the high of another successful Roots Picnic, Quest is back with another doc, and this time his subject is the award-winning (and genre-bending) band, Earth, Wind & Fire.
Titled Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World) the film follows Maurice White in his journey from humble beginnings in Memphis, Tennessee, to helming one of the most influential collectives in music history. Even more inspiring, the doc highlights White’s ability to take risks and truly bet on yourself. As the lead drummer for Ramsey Lewis in the late 1960s, White ultimately wanted to do his own thing—and man, did it pay off. (“Why would you want to leave this for an idea that doesn’t exist yet?” Quest jokingly asked me during our conversation.) Since then, the group has sold over 90 million records, won six Grammys, and remains in heavy rotation at cookouts and barbecues worldwide.
On the eve of the documentary’s release, Questlove spoke to ESSENCE about White’s genius, why he’s reading over 40 books a year now, and the power of manifestation. “Once you get a vision of what you want, dream further because we never ask the most for us,” he said.
ESSENCE: Earth, Wind & Fire (To Be Celestial vs That’s the Weight of the World)—what a name. Why this documentary, and why now?
Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson: When I did Summer of Soul, I came into it thinking I was just going to make a cool mixtape of performances. And then I realized that the story of the people watching was the real story. And as I learned once people started watching it, how it emotionally touched them, I realized how important joy was to the conversation in 2020. And that’s also a time period where a lot of us as people had to face life decisions. Whatever life was before COVID, it’s going to be a little bit different now.
And so once I started doing the Sly [Stone] doc, the Sly doc and my life were sort of running parallel. What happens when you get the success that you want? And it’s not lost on me that I kind of have been immersed in a system where I’m watching my peers self-sabotage. I’m kind of watching my self-sabotage. It became a thing of like, be careful what you ask for. Of course I want to be rich and I want to be successful and I want to have this house and this property—we all say that we want that. What I later learned was that what I should have been asking for is the bandwidth to withstand those things. So now when I dream of success, I also want the space in my heart to accept it because when you are a chosen one and a chosen figure, the first thing you feel is guilt.
Survivor’s remorse, almost.
This is what Sly dealt with. Suddenly you’re separate, you’re different from your crew. Don’t go changing on us all now, Mr. Man, and all those things. We will dim our light in order to make other people feel comfortable. So in this particular case, this film came to me in 2023, which otherwise should have been us recovering and getting back to ourselves. However, I had a strange feeling that we were going to go through an even darker round two in a couple of years. And I remember the feeling, in the pandemic, of learning in real time how to bring common peace to myself while thinking the world’s coming to an end. And this time I wanted to be prepared. And so for me, this film is the story of how a five-year-old broken-hearted orphan accidentally stumbles into metaphysics. And in terms of metaphysics, when I first heard these terms back when I was a kid, I just dismissed it as new age woo-woo. Granola people hippie talk. (Laughs.)
I used to make fun of all those people and then I became that person. Metaphysics is where instead of you praying and begging to God for this raise or to close this house payment or to keep my kids safe in college and all those things, you don’t have to talk in metaphysics, you have to be silent. And oftentimes people tell me, “oh man, I don’t know if I can be silent for 20 minutes,” but metaphysics is literally just sitting still for 20 minutes and it’s so silent that all the inspiration comes to you. All of the ideas come to you. And I wanted people to see a real life example of that happening, Maurice White writing down his intentions, Maurice White writing his affirmations, him dreaming, him taking a risk.
He definitely bet on himself at a time when his career was taking off. Maurice White, I mean.
Black people, we love safety. We love safety. We love knowing the money’s in the bag. We love that. Why would you leave a secure job? You’re the most popular drummer in a jazz group ever. You’re making pop hits. And yet and still in this story, you see a guy who accepts gigs where he knows he’s going to get booed, where he knows he’s going to get their ass kicked opening up for Parliament-Funkadelic. So this is a band who knows how to deal in the darkest times in post-modern history. And that’s what I want people to learn from this film.
Earth, Wind & Fire has such an extensive history. What was the biggest challenge in trying to narrow it down into a two-hour documentary?
Knowing how passionate I am about music, I’m all about inside baseball. So of course what I really wanted to know is, hey, George Massenberg, did you use vacuum compressions when you did “See the Light?” How much cutting and pasting did you do on Larry Dunn’s solo on this particular song? How many takes did it take for the horns to learn “Magic Mind?”
That’s the musician in you.
Yeah, I wanted all the inside baseball talk, but the first thing I did was I put in my bathroom mirror, stick to one story only and the story I want to know, and I really didn’t learn this until the pandemic. When I started DJing online, suddenly I was listening. I did an Earth, Wind & Fire set and in spinning their music for four hours straight, I was like, “yo, this is the most relentlessly positive band of all time. Even their pronouns are proper. “‘You’ is always as far as they get with pronouns. In Maurice’s mind to say, “Girl, I love you so much.” You’re alienating half your audience because he’s singing to his love interest. Maurice’s philosophy was, “Anything that we do has to be universal.” So how do you still express those things, but this could apply to anything? This could apply to animals.” And so as a result, I would always joke, how did this band trick us into eating our vegetables?
Who wants to be this positive? And so once I realized what they were about when the project landed in my lap, I hit up Kahbran White, his son, and said, “Make me a list of every book your father has ever read that led him to Earth, Wind & Fire.” And I took about seven months out and I thought I was just going to do some minor perusing and look at the highlighted parts and yellow ink. But dude, I read all the Napoleon Hill books and the Neville Goddard books and Robert Green. Anything that he read, I read probably three times over. Even now to this day, I haven’t let it go. I just wanted just to get a general direction, but the more I read, it was like I was morphing into Maurice White myself. So this is kind of a happy accident that I wound into.
That’s interesting. When you read, do you take notes? When you say you read certain books three times over, what was your process?
So this is what I realized. And again, a lot of where the amount of seeds that I planted in 2020, there’s eight projects I seeded of which this winds up being the fourth. So there’s still four more projects to do and that’s just the movies. So I planted a lot of seeds in 2020 and in quarantining at a friend’s farm upstate where it’s quiet and isolating, I would take a lot of walks with my audiobooks and just listen to them.
So, the way that the brain works, you retain information when your subconscious brain is listening. So people who cram for tests and repeat things over and over and over. No, that’s not how you do it. Literally, I will sleep to a Neville Goddard book and wake up wiser than I ever was before because subliminally I’ve taken that in. But when you’re driving, that’s another way to let your subconscious work because yes, I am hyper-focused on driving up the road, but the information is still coming into my brain and that’s how I retain it. Usually on Sundays, that was my day to myself in which I will get in the car and drive four hours north and drive four hours back. So I might drive to the outskirts of Buffalo or Niagara Falls and turn around by 4:00 PM and get home by 8:00, doing an eight-hour drive. So just driving was my happy place and that’s where I would just take in all these books and really absorb the knowledge. But in addition to having the physical copies as well.
That makes sense. You’ve always seemed very astute, and voracious in your quest—no pun intended—for knowledge.
(Laughs) I’m a completist. I’m just a completist. And yeah, before the pandemic, I might’ve read maybe three to four books a year, but now it’s like my obsession. I’ll probably go through maybe 40 books a year now. I’m wholly obsessed with just self-improvement and what I can learn from that sort of thing. But I think it’s just the completest of me.
With you directing this and compiling all this archival footage, was there anything during your research that surprised you or that you didn’t know about the band?
Well, number one, I wasn’t too happy that my hometown of Philadelphia is what made Earth, Wind & fire, Earth, Wind & Fire. We are world famous for booing people. I personally believe that booing is our way of showing love to you. Look, here’s the greatest example. Bill Burr is popping right now and I have reason to believe despite his many appearances on the Chappelle Show, “The Racial Draft,” Bill Burr has been kind of a side comedy character for the longest, but he does this show in Philly once and it’s only a nine-minute set and in the first 20 seconds they’re like, You know what? You corny. Boo, boo. And he took it and because he took it.
In that instance, we respected the shit out of him. And suddenly it was a standing ovation. The same thing happened to Earth, Wind & Fire. They got on stage, they laughed at their costumes and they won Philly over. So, I didn’t know that they went through a struggle in trying to find an audience. And then I definitely didn’t know that P-Funk whooped their ass. However, there’s a song by Funkadelic called “Let’s Take It To The Stage” in which George definitely gets some licks in there. “Let’s Take It To The Stage” is a kind of funk ’70s version of “Not Like Us.” They’re literally making fun of every funk band that ever existed saying, “Y’all can’t beat us on stage or whatever.” So there’s that.
And I definitely, probably the most heartbroken I was, was just finding out that my two favorite Earth, Wind & Fire albums that Philip [Bailey] was not a fan of them at all. I understand his point of them feeling like a fractured side unit than the most popular band in music. But yeah, Philip Bailey not liking the Raise! album was kind of perplexing to me. And now I can’t help but feel a cynical darkness now that I know that the band members weren’t too happy with that record, even though it’s one of my favorite albums.
What was the other one?
Well, okay, so Philip likes All In All, but All In All was the biggest challenge to Maurice because his father figure was Charles Stepney, and then Stepney dies in ‘76 and Maurice has to sort of pick up the reins and continue the mission and basically produce the All In All album by himself. There’s just a lot of insecurity. But I mean, it was necessary. That move was necessary for Maurice to take his own advice, which is listen to his heart, all the metaphysics and meditation that he was doing, he had to follow his own instincts. But yeah, I will say that to me, it was just rather shocking to hear the problems that they were going through during the time period in which I thought they were just living the dream.
You did the Sly Stone doc, and Summer of Soul as well. What is your chief goal or your aim as a filmmaker?
So, I’m world famous for saying a plan and then the universe is like, “check this out, hold my beer.” The opposite always happens. My number one intention is to make us look human. It’s always my intention because oftentimes—for good and for bad—we’re not looked at as human. Even in watching the O.J. [Simpson] doc, he had to be Superman. He had to be a credit to his race. He had to be the greatest running back of all time. And then towards the end of that doc, he became a caricature.
Oftentimes we don’t get to see the human, the relatable human behind it, be it if we see them as trash or if we see them at Beyoncé, God level, it’s hard to separate that this person isn’t a deity, they’re a human being. So for me, it’s showing the human side. So again, it’s not an accident to show the guilt that Sly feels for being the chosen one, and he might be acting out by trying to sabotage it.
I absolutely, positively had some days in which I would tell my team, “Make it stop, make it go away. Take us out of the running. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to do that.” And it’s a “fear” thing. It’s a “fear” thing of not knowing what’s next. For this particular film, I know that a lot of us are now working on the mental health space of our lives. And usually around this time we either are going to choose therapy or religion. And I kind of wanted to find the happy medium and the happy medium to me starts with any decision that you make in life. You should sit with yourself in silence and really just really sit with it first before you make a rash decision. So that’s my goal for this film. The Michael film kind of helped me out a little bit because we saw the amount of times he was writing on his Post-its and putting it on the mirror and all those things.That’s the importance of any mission to have intention to write it and to remind yourself and repeat it and say it. That is how we get out of the mind state and the place where we are currently.
Yeah, I started doing that after I saw the Michael film. I started writing little affirmations and putting them on my mirror. The phrase, “I’m a magnet for miracles,” is just so powerful to me.
Here’s the weird thing, manifestations and affirmations work for the light and the dark and we’ve seen examples. I’ll give you an example. The first three Jay-Z records, I was the typical underground backpacker that was like, “Man, these rappers are telling tall tales of things that have never happened yet.” Now I’m like, “Well, wait, was Jay-Z lying about those things or was he manifesting and putting out what he wants his life to be?” And sure enough, as a result, Jay-Z has literally checked off everything that he rhymed about in his canon and that is metaphysics. It’s you having to speak your future self whenever the number one exercise is, once you get a vision of what you want, dream further because we never ask the most for us. We’re always like, “Oh, I want too much. I just want this little bit.” And that’s a lie. We want the full package, but it’s really about you going to the end of that and then figuring out the steps backwards of how you got there. Okay, I see the house I’m in, I see my bank account’s full, I see these awards on the wall. Now, what were the steps that it took to get here? And that’s where you write down what your goals are and that’s important for us.
