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Movie Review: A Music Doc Explores the Inner Lives of Hip Hop Giants

By Peter Simek |
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Like any pop hit, there’s a familiar structure to the band documentary: precocious teenage geniuses meet and gel for a few precious, acclaimed years before it all falls apart under the weight of their singular personalities. As told in actor Michael Rapaport’s directorial debut, Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest, the storyline is no different for the seminal hip hop group A Tribe Called Quest. The trio – and sometimes foursome – met in Jamaica, Queens in 1985 and helped usher in what is called the “Golden Age of Hip Hop.” Then, after a handful monumental albums (and a couple of just plain decent recordings), personalities caused friction and the band fell apart.

The question, then, is what is the intrigue of Rapaport’s movie? The film began as a kind of concert documentary. In 2006, the group reunited to perform at a festival in Seattle, and Rapaport was there with his camera. But the reunion didn’t work out. In backstage scenes, the two main forces behind Tribe, Phife and Q-Tip, bicker and fight like a nagging old couple.

From there Rapaport tries to rope together a handful of storylines. There is the standard look back at the group’s origins and early success, revisiting their high schools and delving into the radio personalities who helped define the New York hip hop scene in the 1980s. The film also plays psychologist, each member taking his turn on the couch to explain, from his perspective, what caused the band to come apart. There are also a handful of cut-in scenes of various well known performers, from Mary J. Blige and Ludacris to the Beastie Boys and Mos Def, who attest to Tribe’s lasting impact on the history of hip-hop.

The end product feels like an undergraduate survey course on a literary movement. You come away with some facts and figures about a handful of artists, some choice quotes about Tribe’s sound and style, and a little bit of biographical material. But each of these documentary approaches yearns for its own in-depth treatment. The music nerd in me was enrapt by Tribe DJ/producer Ali Shaheed Muhammad’s turntable demonstration, in which he pulled classic jazz and R&B records from his racks and showed how he pieced them together to create Tribe’s unique, sophisticated, and infectious sound. The part of me that gets wrapped into cheaply produced late night A&E documentaries wanted more time spent on Tribe’s early days on Linden Blvd. and the flowering of the cultural scene that produced so many bands and whose influence stretches far and wide. There’s also the little known back story that Phife spent most of his and career struggling with diabetes, and Rapaport shows how this created tension in the band, and then later on, contributed to both their reunion and ongoing strife between the two front men.

Unfortunately, with all of these various tangents, none of the storylines gets a full-fleshed treatment. The most coherent narrative thread involves Phife’s struggle with diabetes and his head butting with Q-Tip. There are some touching moments, such as their brief emotional truce immediately before Phife undergoes kidney transplant surgery. But much of it just feels like walking in on an ugly domestic dispute. And while you do walk away from Beats Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest with a deeper appreciation for the Tribe and their music, you also come away reminded that, like Tribe, a truly great music documentary is just as rare and elusive a thing.

Michael Rapaport will be in town this Friday, July 29, and will participate in Q&As following the 3:10pm show at the Angelika Plano and the 8:00pm show at the Angelika Dallas on July 29.

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