“BEATS, RHYMES AND LIFE: THE TRAVELS OF A TRIBE CALLED QUEST”
Directed by Michael Rapaport
**** (four stars)
“Back in the days when I was a teenager
Before I had status and before I had a pager
You could find the Abstract listening to hip-hop
My pops used to say it reminded him of be-bop”
-A Tribe Called Quest (“Excursions”)
I was, and to an extent (and for much different reasons), remain a hip-hop skeptic.
With music, the sounds that immediately grabbed my ears, mind, heart and soul were the songs that played on the radio during the 1970s. My parents have often told me that side two of The Beatles’ “Abbey Road” album would soothe me unlike anything else when I was a baby. During my nursery school years, I had profound connections to songs like The Temptations’ “Papa Was A Rolling Stone,” Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze” and side one of Elton John’s classic “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” album. As I grew older, my tastes naturally gravitated to the sounds and power of rock music with Chicago’s WLS-AM becoming my beloved station of choice, the station's DJ as heroes and Peter Frampton, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Queen, E.L.O. and KISS emerging as personal favorites. By the time I was nine years old in 1978, The Beatles became an obsession, an obsession I hold just as tightly onto today.
Around that time, as I took the bus to school with the radio blaring the R&B of the day via WJPC, a new sound blasted through the speakers and grabbed the complete attention of every child so forcefully, it could have been physical. The song was “Rapper’s Delight” by The Sugarhill Gang. Utilizing the basic tracks from Chic’s “Good Times,” “Rapper’s Delight,” long acknowledged as possibly being the first rap song, became the song that everyone on that school bus loved and was determined to learn—even me! Also, during that period, I found myself being drawn to tracks like Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” and “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five at family reunions and barbeques but my musical heart fiercely (perhaps too fiercely) held its allegiance to rock and roll and nothing was going to tear me away from it.
By the time Run-DMC exploded onto the musical scene during my high school years, I had vehemently (and wrongly) rejected them and the whole concept of rap music as an art form altogether. Maybe it was a way to remain tight with certain friends and social circle. Definitely it was largely due to my status as a drummer as I could not see the musical validity in synthetic beats and people just…speaking in rhymes. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand it and I just didn’t want to. It wasn’t what I had thought of as music and so, I desired nothing more that for it to be kept as far away from me as possible.
I finally saw the light and began to bob my head while in college, 1989 to be exact. While visiting a friend and fellow student radio DJ in his dorm room, he forced me to sit down and finally take a listen to a then recently released hip-hop album that he felt would be the one that I would like for certain. As I sat and waited for him to cue the CD, I had my guard up and was more than prepared to barely tolerate the entire experience at best. By the end of the album, I dramatically realized that he was absolutely correct and I was, and had been, completely and utterly wrong. Not only did I like the album, I LOVED it and soon purchased a copy for myself. The album in question was “3 Ft High and Rising” by De La Soul.
Soon thereafter, and almost by accident, I sat in my own dorm room and listened from front to back and reading the lyric sheet the entire time, to an album many of my friends and fellow student DJs had been salivating over and I had paid absolutely no attention to. That album was “Fear Of A Black Planet” by Public Enemy, an album I still feel is easily one of the best albums I have ever listened to.
For a few months before and after my college graduation in 1991, I worked in Memorial Library shelving books and the like with my headphones almost surgically strapped to my ears. I religiously switched cassettes by Julian Cope, Funkadelic, World Party, and XTC over and again but what I listened to most often, other than De La Soul’s brilliant sophomore album “De La Soul Is Dead” was the undeniably, unapologetically and justifiably incredible music experience known as “People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths Of Rhythm” by A Tribe Called Quest. I was glued to that album as I walked up and down the library stacks day after every spring and summer day as songs like “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo,” “Luck Of Lucien,” “Description Of A Fool,” “After Hours,” and the masterful “Bonita Applebum” flowed through my spirit. To this day, I feel that album is one of the best debut albums I have ever heard…of any musical genre. A Tribe Called Quest had me and I was ready to travel any musical path they placed in front of me.
While this review’s preamble was more on the lengthier side than usual, I felt it to be more than fitting due to the paths and travels of my own musical life. I could not help but to re-explore my personal journey as I viewed the musical journey of the hip-hop legends A Tribe Called Quest in “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest,” the joyously first rate documentary and debut film from actor turned Director and hard core fan Michael Rapaport. In addition to exploring the requisite vicissitudes in the still influential 20-year career of the group, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” also beautifully chronicles the strong yet difficult friendship between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the group’s focal members.
Even more impressively, Rapaport utilizes his film to commemorate what many, including myself, refer to as the “Golden Age of Hip-Hop,” a time set between the late eighties and early nineties where “hip-hop artists used to teach Black people to love themselves,” as writer/cartoonist Aaron McGruder expressed so succinctly in the opening to his first “Boondocks” comic strip collection. With “Beats, Rhymes & Life,” Rapaport has compiled an enormously entertaining and emotional film designed to keep your feet moving, the theater speakers bangin’ and your mind and spirit active and alert. Simply stated, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” is a film that is as artistically rewarding as any of the five albums in A Tribe Called Quest’s catalog. When it makes its way to your town, it is a film that should not be missed!
Beginning with scenes of internal group turmoil and personal dissolution, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” works its way backwards to the childhood days of Q-Tip (nee Jonathan Davis) and Phife Dawg (nee Malik Taylor) who have been friends since the age of two and lived nearly a block away from each other in Queens, New York. We are also soon introduced to band DJ/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad and rapper Jarobi White, another childhood friend of Phife Dawg’s. As the foursome’s friendship and artistic collaboration formed, (along with the creation of The Native Tongues posse which featured De La Soul, Jungle Brothers, Monie Love among others) A Tribe Called Quest eventually grew into one of hip-hop true innovative pioneers as they created five multi-platinum selling albums and achieved global fame and recognition in just under ten years.
As these musical stories tend to go, creative and personal tensions began to rear its ugly head, thus affecting the overall positivity that was inherent within their music. With the band’s twin towers of the esoteric, velvet voiced Q-Tip combined with the streetwise, higher pitched rasp of Phife Dawg, the twosome were as compelling as Page and Plant, Jagger and Richards and apparently just as fraught with friction as so many artists who have come before and those who still remain.
Even after their abrupt and surprising disbandment in 1998, the shadow cast by A Tribe Called Quest continues to loom largely over hip-hop as artists by the likes of The Roots, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, Erykah Badu and even Kanye West have continued in A Tribe Called Quest’s footsteps and to whom they certainly owe their careers.
It is obvious from the films’ first few moments that “Beats, Rhymes & Life” is a labor of love for Michael Rapaport and I greatly appreciated how he was obviously determined to make the a motion picture experience as best as he was able. Visually, Rapaport has a poetic eye that reminded me of images from Spike Lee’s films and he holds the vision of a true filmmaker so assured with his cinematic approach to this material, which is infused with a deeper than the ocean love for this group. “Beats, Rhymes & Life” is a film that works simultaneously a celebration and requiem, for not only A Tribe Called Quest but for the state of hip-hop itself. It saddens me that so much of current hip-hop is mournfully less about pride, integrity, knowledge, identity, and community and has seemingly not recovered from the over 30 year drug, guns and thug induced hangover and haze of Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic.”
From a musical standpoint, “Beats, Rhymes and Life” is downright masterful as we not only hear all of the classic songs from A Tribe Called Quest, the film contains a treasure trove of classic performance footage from the band’s heyday as well as from the 2008 and 2010 reunion tours. Rapaport gives us excellent and brand new interview sections with all four band members plus their respective hip-hop contemporaries including The Beastie Boys, Monie Love, Busta Rhymes and the legendary DJ Red Alert among others.
“Beats, Rhymes & Life” also provided a true musical and even social education for me. The construction of music from guitars, keyboards drums and vocals, for instance is something I conceptually understand. The construction of a hip-hop song through samples is another beast entirely and I appreciated the time Rapaport and the members of A Tribe Called Quest took to allow us a glimpse behind the curtain. One great sequence depicts Q-Tip breaking down the classic song “Can I Kick It?” down to the origins of its drum beat. As far as lyrics are concerned, and during an interview segment, Q-Tip hilariously illustrates how “I Left My Wallet In El Segundo” had its origins from a now obscure “Sanford and Son” reference. Through these moments and so many more, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” shows not only the artistry of hip-hop but precisely how art surrounds us, how it can arrive from any sources at any place and time, and how we just have to have the foresight, ingenuity, talent, passion and vision to capture it and create something new. A Tribe Called Quest were nothing less than groundbreaking as they merged a myriad of styles and genres (most notably jazz), fusing them into a sound that has often been copied, never truly equaled and continues to greatly influence as new interviews with Pharrell Williams, Common, ?uestlove and Black Thought of The Roots can attest. A Tribe Called Quest utilized an idiosyncratic visual approach to their clothing and music videos and their musical subject matter defiantly avoided hip-hop clichés from redundant boasting, horrific violent fantasies and negative stereotypes. They were always left of center yet harmonious and inclusive, encouraging anyone and everyone to join their special party.
What spoke to me most in the film’s earlier sequences, was the nearly spiritual connection all four band members, plus other prominent hip-hop artists and DJs of that particular time, had with the radio. It was enlightening to see the connection they shared with the music and the array of influential DJs that led them all to the music they would eventually create and hopefully contribute to the rich musical legacy of African-Americans and the world at large. What I saw into the world of hip-hop through these scenes was the exact same soulful connection to radio, the DJs and the music itself that I have had throughout my life and has also been expressed by all of the musicians that I have loved and continue to be inspired by throughout my life. The music of hip-hop and A Tribe Called Quest in particular is music made by fans of music, how that love translates itself into art and how that art connects and binds us all together as a global community. Moments and shared stories like the ones shown in “Beats, Rhymes & Life” make this film a profoundly revelatory experience, which in turn makes it entirely communal. All of this makes the fractured friendship of Q-Tip and Phife Dawg so saddening and gripping.
“Beats, Rhymes & Life” is no puff piece or candyfloss infomercial. As mentioned in my beloved “Almost Famous” (2000) by the great Cameron Crowe, Rapaport is honest and unmerciful with his subject matter, most notably the yin-yang relationship between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. Perhaps this just may be the reason why the release of this film had been held up for so long as Q-Tip and Phife’s discomfort with how much of their inner turmoil is presented for the world to see has been well documented.
While all four band members are fascinating, individualistic, wholly intelligent subjects each deserving a film of their own Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, in particular, are instantly and completely captivating individuals, whose full expressiveness as interview subjects just made me want to sit and listen to them for hours. It was also interesting to see how the two men have changed physically over 20 years. Q-Tip, with his sleek trench coat and matching hat, has grown more attractive, physically fit, elegant and dapper while the diminutive Phife Dawg has grown more scarred, mostly due to his lifelong battle with diabetes and his crippling addiction to sugary sweets (a topic Rapaport thankfully spends much time examining). Yet, where Phife remains loquacious, open, funny and warm, Q-Tip, while no less engaging, is a bit harder to pin down. Even in those tension filled backstage moments during the 2008 tour, as he is being questioned to whether this show is the final show A Tribe Called Quest will ever perform, he bobs, weaves, ducks, dives, dodges and deflects the question eschewing any potential fullness of claim to the responsibility of dismantling the band. Meanwhile, Ali Shaheed Muhammad remains the diplomatic center while Jarobi White stays out of the squabbling entirely.
I also loved the very quick shot Rapaport captures at the film’s opening which depicts the final night of that same tour as Phife and Q-Tip prowl the stage walking opposite from each other, an on-stage moment effectively mirroring their own disintegrating friendship. But then, by the end of the film, Rapaport gives us a moment during the 2010 reunion tour, which shows Q-Tip and Phife happily rehearsing together and dancing in unison.
The greatest irony of “Beats, Rhymes & Life” comes directly from Q-Tip and Phife Dawg themselves. It was just so astonishing to me to see how these two men, these masterful wordsmiths with intensely magnetic personalities on stage and screen, utterly engaging interviews subjects are able to find an ocean’s worth of words to say to absolutely everyone except each other. With this, Rapaport shows this friendship, with all of its tensions and unbreakable bonds with such an eloquence and truth and it gives the film as a whole a greater and rock solid foundation.
As Phife Dawg rhymes with unquestionable ebullience, “Microphone check…1…2…what is this?” I will just as emphatically tell you what this is. This is a film thunderously about beats. This is a film beatifically about rhymes. This is a passionate film about the tenuous and majestic nature of life filtered through the realization of shared artistic dreams and life long friendships. For me, “Beats, Rhymes & Life” stands even taller than “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” (2010) and this year’s “Foo Fighters: Back And Forth,” two recent and excellent music documentaries.
While my skepticism surrounding hip-hop may still be present, as far as A Tribe Called Quest is concerned, I am a firm believer. Furthermore, I believe that “Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest” is easily one of 2011’s high points.
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