Questlove TIME’s “Coolest Person of the Year”

On the heels of Mr. Pope being named TIME’s “Person of the Year,” Questlove has earned the magazine’s recent “Coolest Person of the Year” designation. Here are a few reasons why.

Questlove, the drummer of the alt-hip-hop band the Roots, dropped bits of coolness everywhere this year. He wrote two cool books, Mo’ Meta Blues—a smart postmodern memoir—and a coffee-table book chronicling Soul Train, the show so cool that my dad, in a failed attempt to prevent me from growing up to be a dork, forced me to watch it as a child. He composed the music for Comedy Central’s very cool Inside Amy Schumer. His website, Okayplayer, which allows alternative musicians to create songs together online, made the dopest Christmas sweater ever. Every Thursday night, he deejays at a bowling alley in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. And since the Roots are Jimmy Fallon’s house band, he’s about to become the bandleader on The Tonight Show.

This would be really exciting, except the guy who picked him, Joel Stein, is possibly the least cool judge of coolness I can imagine: A racially insensitive snarky columnist for TIME Magazine who used to work for Martha Stewart Living and was a regular commentator on Vh1’s “I Love the 80s” and “I Love the 90s.”