Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest Full Documentary

Michael Rapaport's captivating hip-hop documentary Beats Rhymes & Life comes uncomfortably close to A Tribe Called Quest, one of the most important and influential groups of the past 25 years. *It's two things at once: a loving, magnetic, gloriously alive tribute to a golden age when a group of brilliant young black men and women joined forces to reinvent* hip-hop in their own funky, Afrocentric image, and the most penetrating psychological study of a creative partnership in perpetual peril since Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster. Why do the sunniest bands often have the darkest, shittiest internal dynamics? Listening to A Tribe Called Quest, the Ramones, or the Beach Boys, few would imagine that the principals of each band were locked in decades-long psychodramas.

Beats Rhymes & Life The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest Full Documentary

Rapaport smartly focuses on the yin and yang duo of Q-Tip and Phife Dawg, the group's lead rappers, and a fascinating study of contrasts. Phife Dawg is heartbreakingly vulnerable, a small, mild-mannered man with an excitable, feminine voice and a debilitating case of diabetes. Everything about Phife is sweet and messy human, even the sugar addiction that puts his health and the group's future at risk at the height of his powers. Q-Tip comes across as Phife's polar opposite, a quietly authoritative bohemian control freak and musical genius. He is cold and calculating where Phife is sincere and serious, ridiculously dapper and well-preserved where Phife looks like what he is - a sick and helpless middle-aged man.

Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels Of A Tribe Called Quest Full Documentary

Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest | Official Trailer

Beats Rhymes & Life begins as an ecstatic celebration of a group that changed pop music while its members were still young enough to not intimately know their limitations. Q-Tip's perfectionism helped elevate hip-hop to an art form, but as Phife became increasingly ill and the mood within the group became more chilling, Q-Tip's controlling methods began to take on a quality of bullying and harassment. Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy, the film ends with rehearsals for another lucrative comeback tour. For one brilliant moment, these complicated men move and groove in unison again, united by the music that is their enduring legacy, even if by then we all know too intimately the abundant darkness just outside the frame.