After Wake Up! won Best Traditional R&B Vocal Performance, Best R&B Song and Best R&B Album at last weekend’s Grammy Awards, The Roots have a total of four Grammy awards. The group has been nominated twice in the Rap category since winning in 1999, but had yet to win again until Sunday. Much like 1999’s win, ?uestlove isn’t counting out the crossover appeal of teaming with an R&B singer.
Man to win one….but 3? This is nothing to @johnlegend but everything to me. Wow. #grammys2011.
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“I would like to think maybe John Legend’s a favorite amongst the voters, so maybe they just went with that,” ?uest joked while talking to Darren Sands of The Village Voice. “I just wanted to collect the award and get off before they had a recount [laughs]. I was just like yo, let me get this shit before they’re like, ‘Oh, we’re sorry, Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers!’ That’s what I was thinking in my head. Until it’s in my hand, I’m always thinking it’s a fluke. The first year we won there’s no way you’re going to tell me that Dr. Dre and Eminem and Snoop and Puffy and R. Kelly and Janet Jackson and Busta Rhymes were going to lose to us.”
In addition to shouting out Best New Artist winner Esperanza Spalding and voicing his dismay at a band [Lady Antebellum] named for America’s pro-slavery, pre Civil War era handling the Teddy Pendergrass tribute, ?uest revealed that Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and GZA aren’t the only Hip Hop artists with random Bill Murray stories to share. After GZA revealed that a night out with Murray left him almost too hungover to perform at South by Southwest, ?uest added that he’s also crossed paths with him.
“Bill Murray has a reputation for just randomly showing up at basement parties in Brooklyn,” ?uestlove explained. “He came to one of my Christmas parties at S.O.B.s, and Bill Murray was like one of the last nine people left. You know, they play that last song and there’s nine people? ‘I’m looking and thinking, ‘Nah, that’s not him.’ But it was him!”
