
Questlove drew from his DJ skills, his filmmaking skills, and his extensive rolodex to open his new three-hour Saturday Night Live documentary with a bang: a six-minute mashup of 50 years of musical performances.
In a new interview with The New York Times, the filmmaker/musician describes the evolution of the history-spanning supercut that opens Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, the upcoming documentary he co-directs with former SNL film unit director Oz Rodriguez.
“In the beginning, I was just going in five-year intervals,” he said, explaining that he tried to pull the “three strongest moments” from each half-decade. “But I’m so programmed as a D.J. it’s physically impossible for me to gather a group of songs together and not start — that’s my version of improvisation.”
However, composing the mix was only half of the battle. The Roots co-founder revealed that the film’s producers discouraged the idea, telling him that getting clearance for all the songs would “never happen.” But Questlove (aka Ahmir Thompson) took matters into his own hands, reaching out to people in his network to clear each of the songs.
“This is the first time that I realized my diplomatic position in music. People say, ‘Ahmir, you might be the next Quincy Jones, because your whole thing is more social than creative, knowing the right people, knowing who’s who,'” he recounted. “There were at least 19 situations in which I had to come hat in hand to said person, and mind you, this is for two seconds [of a song].”
In fact, Questlove told the Times that he only wound up receiving one “outright no”—from the estate of Luciano Pavarotti. A sample of the opera singer’s 1998 SNL performance was part of an Bobby McFerrin-Busta Rhymes mashup, but it never came to fruition. “It was too much to explain to his estate, and I couldn’t go to Italy and whatever,” Questlove said.
Regardless, running six minutes long and culled from fifty years of SNL history, the track sounds pretty epic.
“I just wanted to throw the ultimate D.J. gig and hook you in from the gate,” Questlove told the Times. “It started off small, and it couldn’t stop.”
“At first, I said, ‘Just let me get the 20 coolest performances, let’s cut and paste it, and that’s it,'” he added. “But… I want to make history buffs and nerds feel good about this show, and I want future creatives to get a master class on how to take risks and be creative.
Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music premieres on NBC January 27th, 2025 at 8pm ET/PT.