THE TONIGHT SHOW

Questlove Shared When He Realized The Roots Were ‘Not Friends’ Anymore And How Jimmy Fallon Fixed It

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Conan O’Brien gets the most out of his guests on the Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend podcast. He bonded with Japanese Breakfast over her Coachella set. Chris Martin explained why Bruce Springsteen is to blame for his decision to stop eat dinner. Billie Eilish shared “heartbreaking” advice she once received from her idol-turned-friend Justin Bieber. And now, Questlove has spilled some tea about The Roots.

Questlove was O’Brien’s guest for the September 4 episode of the podcast, and their hour-plus conversation included insight into how Jimmy Fallon helped piece The Roots back together again.

Questlove explained that personal and professional responsibilities were stretching The Roots thin around 2009, so they wished “a Celine Dion situation would happen,” meaning a stable residency. Their version of that was joining up with Fallon, first on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon and then as the in-house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which he said “is what we needed to actually bond and be friends again.”

The Grammy and Oscar winner then shared a story involving the Red Hot Chili Peppers around 2006 that had previously made him realize that he was no longer friends with his longtime bandmates

“We’re on tour with the Chili Peppers, and it’s a European tour. And they’re playing, like, soccer — I’m sorry, post-[Ted] Lasso, football stadiums,” he said. “You know, it’s like 80,000 to 120,000 [people] a night. Every three to four songs, those guys get into sort of a football magic circle huddle. By the fourth time they do this, I’m thinking like, ‘Oh, they’re gonna call an audible and change up the setlist.’ And then, I had the setlist in my hand, I’m like, Wait, they didn’t change anything. … Why do they keep having these little meetings every five songs, and nothin’ changes from what I know the show to be?”

He continued, “I see Flea in catering, and I’m like, ‘Dude, what are you guys talking about when you go into that huddle?’ And Flea is like, ‘Yo, man, it’s like, I don’t know, man. We’re just so full of gratitude.’”

While Questlove was initially “dismissive” of Flea’s reasoning, his manager put it into perspective: The Red Hot Chili Peppers “actually” liked each other, and The Roots has unknowingly transitioned from being friends to “just business partners” around 2006 or ’07.

“I realized, Ah, sh*t. We’re really not friends. We’re just nine strangers that just play the same songs every night, and that’s it,” Questlove said. “What wound up happening at Fallon is Jimmy has a way of disarming you. At least for the first six years, we were 13-year-olds in adults’ bodies, we could do silly things and not feel like we’re gonna lose our street cred because we’re doing silly sh*t.”

At one point, Questlove said, Fallon “talked The Roots into an eight-man human pyramid,” which perfectly illustrated how crucial Fallon would be to reconnecting them with each other and their individual humanity.

Watch the full clip above.

Lil Uzi Vert Danced Through A Late-Night Performance Of ‘Just Wanna Rock’

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Has Lil Uzi Vert‘s insistent Jersey Club-influenced hit “Just Wanna Rock” peaked yet? It seems doubtful, but it has reached the point in its arc when they’re performing it live for late-night audiences. I wonder what the average Tonight Show viewer thought when they turned on their televisions last night to be confronted by the image of the tatted-up, mohawked, piercing-dotted visage of the pint-sized Philly MC bobbing and bouncing across the screen with a small fleet of punk-garbed dancers. Probably something about millennials.

But hey, maybe they enjoyed it. After all, Uzi’s new hit has that unbridled, chaotic energy that makes it almost undeniably one of the most fun products of the post-pandemic era. Uzi barely raps on the song, letting the persistent kick drums do most of the heavy lifting, punctuated periodically by their piercing, filtered “Daaaaaaaaamns.” The whole song is like one extended dance breakdown; knowing this, Uzi brings the energy, doing as much movement as the backup dancers that crowd the stages during performances of the track.

So maybe “Just Wanna Rock” has as much of a chance to play as well for the older late-night demographic as it did for the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice crowd. And if not, too bad. Something tells me that we’re going to be hearing this song for a long time.

Watch Lil Uzi Vert perform “Just Wanna Rock” on The Tonight Show above.

Black Thought Filled In For Trugoy In De La Soul’s ‘Tonight Show’ Performance Of ‘Stakes Is High’

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De La Soul’s de facto “comeback” has been bittersweet; while the group’s groundbreaking catalog has finally come to streaming platforms, it only did so after one member of the trio, Trugoy The Dove, died at the age of just 54 years old.

However, the remaining members, Posdnous and Maseo, are trucking along as best they can. They stopped by The Tonight Show this week, where they took the stage with the band to perform one of their signature songs, “Stakes Is High,” with The Roots. Black Thought helped fill the void left by Dave’s passing, rapping his verses with perfect chemistry alongside Pos — an unsurprising development, considering the impact “Stakes Is High” has had on hip-hop. Who doesn’t know those iconic rhymes?

Ahead of the performance, house band leader Questlove gave De La some flowers, telling them how much they influenced The Roots. “For the first time, we just saw, like, ourselves,” he said. “This is how the group bonded, Tariq [Black Thought] and I. We saw three friends just having fun with each other, practical jokes and all that stuff, and we had never seen that in hip-hop before.”

Meanwhile, De La’s entree to the streaming world has been pretty successful; their game-changing debut, 3 Feet High And Rising, re-entered the Billboard 200 with a new peak of No. 15.

Watch De La Soul and The Roots perform the classic “Stakes Is High” above.

The Cast Of ‘The Super Mario Bros Movie’ Sang The Game’s Iconic Theme With The Roots And A Special Guest

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie is just a month away from hitting theaters and the Nintendo/Illumination PR team is going all-out to promote it. In addition to crafting an interactive website for a hypothetical Mario Bros. plumbing business and releasing a new, final trailer yesterday showing off even more of its Mad Max-inspired Rainbow Road sequence.

The cast and crew weren’t done yet, though. The film’s voice actors — consisting of Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy, Keegan-Michael Key, Seth Rogen, Fred Armisen, and Charlie Day — stopped by The Tonight Show for a musical sketch in which they sing the iconic Super Mario Bros. video game theme song acapella alongside the show’s host Jimmy Fallon and house band The Roots.

In a Brady Bunch-like sequence, each singer appears in their own squares, which slide and shift across the screen while scenes from both the video game and the movie scroll by. Jack Black appears to be having an utter blast, especially when the game’s underground theme kicks in. Then, as they all reach the “end” of the level, they’re joined by a few more special guests: Mario creator Shigeru Miyamoto and Illumination founder Chris Meledandri (who gets vocal backup from the Minions, naturally).

It’s a cute bit, which is to be expected from The Tonight Show, but it’s also a testament to how truly iconic and generational the Mario brand has been for the past four decades.

Watch the clip above.

Go Ahead And Add The ‘Buffy The Vampire Slayer’ TV Series To The List Of Things We Need To Thank Dolly Parton For

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For years, there have been rumors that Dolly Parton was a secret producer on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series that became a massive genre hit in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Well, it’s no longer a mystery. While appearing on The Tonight Show, Buffy star Sarah Michelle Gellar confirmed to Jimmy Fallon that the iconic singer played a silent role in the show’s breakout success. Not only that, but Parton was a fan of the vampire-slaying series and its star, which Gellar was not prepared for at the time.

Via Gizmodo:

“Little known fact, the legend Dolly Parton was a producer,” Gellar revealed on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon. “And you know, we never saw her. We’d get Christmas gifts in the beginning that would have our name and I would think, ‘She doesn’t know who I am.’ And then one day somebody asked her about it and she complimented the show and my performance. And I was like ‘Oh, I can die now. Dolly Parton knows who I am and thinks I’m good.’ Her partner was Sandy Gallin and they produced Buffy.”

Of course, producing shows like Buffy is just the kind of benevolent person that Dolly Parton loves to be. Case in point: The iconic singer helped put up money to develop a coronavirus vaccine and was heralded as a saint when it turned out she backed the Moderna vaccine that, along with Pfizer, helped turn the tide of the pandemic. Is there anything Dolly can’t do? We’d probably believe it if someone said she could levitate.

(Via Gizmodo)

Freddie Gibbs Performed A Satin-Smooth ‘SSS’ Medley With Anderson .Paak On ‘Fallon’

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Freddie Gibbs showed off his “Aquaman lungs” on Monday night (January 23) on The Tonight Show with Anderson .Paak to perform a medley of songs from his major-label debut album, Soul Sold Separately. Gibbs’ gift for breath control is already legendary but last night, a huge audience got to witness his prowess as he blazed through satin-smooth renditions of “Blackest In The Room” and “Feel No Pain.”

Dappered down in an all-black two-piece suit, Gibbs appeared not to take a breath as he recited his rapid-fire lyrics backed by The Roots. .Paak kept his usual ’70s-inspired look, with a fur-cuffed jacket and his signature cabbie hat, brushing the dirt off Gibbs’ shoulders.

Although Soul Sold Separately (and its recently-released deluxe edition) is barely half a year old, Gibbs refuses to rest on his laurels. He recently revealed that he’s currently working on as many as four albums at once, including his oft-teased R&B album.

Watch Freddie Gibbs’ late-night performance on The Tonight Show above. He’s also expressed a wish to branch out dramatically with more film and television roles after the positive reception for his feature debut, Down With The King, so don’t be surprised if the next time we see him with Jimmy Fallon and the gang, he’s sitting on the couch with that 1,000-watt smile beaming.

Freddie Gibbs is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Wiz Khalifa Jokes Michael Phelps Has ‘Better Lungs Than Aquaman’ After Smoking With The Gold Medalist

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To be such a stoner, Wiz Khalifa is a pretty busy guy lately (take that, 1990s frying pan PSAs). In addition to releasing his seventh solo studio album Multiverse earlier this year, he’s been training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, expanding his acting credits with the George Clinton biopic Spinning Gold, and even indulging his karaoke bug by appearing on The Masked Singer last year as “Chameleon” (he finished in third place).

He sat down with Jimmy Fallon on The Tonight Show last night (Wednesday, December 14) to discuss all of the above, as well as getting into some of his other business endeavors like the Khalifa Kush weed brand. He also joked about his nine-year-old son Sebastian taking over his in-home studio to boss his engineer around while recording his own music. Jimmy got him to open up about his ASMR habit (hair noises) and smoking with Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps, who has “better lungs than Aquaman.”

Then, he performed his Multiverse single “Memory Lane” with his band.

Watch Wiz Khalifa perform “Memory Lane” on The Tonight Show up top, and watch his full interview with Jimmy Fallon above.

Wiz Khalifa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.