Anti-Climacus

?questlove, quotable as always:

Pitchfork: Obviously, "You Got Me" was a huge moment for the Roots. Did you ever feel the urge to chase the success of that song more?

?: If anything, we did quite the opposite. For anyone that's ever had a musical breakthrough in their career, it's always followed by the departure period right after. [Stevie Wonder's] Songs in the Key of Life gave you Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. [Prince's] Purple Rain gave you Around the World in a Day. [The Beatles'] Revolver gave you Sgt. Pepper's-- which kind of backfired and made them even bigger. It's funny, I can see the science in how music is made with other artists, but it's hard for me to dissect my own thing. It's easy for me to say, "Oh yeah, that's the self-saboteur move that most artists pull whenever they're afraid."

And I just felt like "You Got Me" was a fluke-- I never thought one million people would mutually agree to buy this one product of ours. Even at the time it was happening, it didn't feel like a victory. Erykah [Badu] was always the focus; we weren't even the stars of our own song. So I thought, "This probably isn't going to happen again, so let's try and make like a catalog record displaying everything that we do, and we'll go out guns ablazing." We probably made four records in that mindset, and that definitely started with Phrenology. I thought, "We had our peak, and rap groups don't last more than six records. We'll probably get dropped." At some point, we were just thinking of it like a suicide mission, so we did everything with reckless abandon.