Review - Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest

By Abi Polinsky

Had you seen me in that movie theater, laid back in my chair, picking at my five dollar Buncha Crunch candy, it wouldn't have taken much scrutiny to see that I was keyed up.  There's something about A Tribe Called Quest that makes you want to see them on a screen. You want to hear them talk, you want to see them perform, you want to see them interact. What you don't want to see however is the fighting and the bickering. Beats, Rhymes, and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is really good. My one primary critique however, would be to say that in retrospect, the documentary seems like a race to document the group's break up. Rapaport does justice to their childhoods, how they grew up together, and how they made their first few albums, but I could have (and did, when I was making the ATCQ page) looked up all of that stuff online. In fact, there weren't  many times when Tribe would reveal something about themselves where I was like, "oh damn...really?" Granted this probably wasn't true for the majority of people, but it would have been nice if when the film was focused on the early periods of Tribe, it went a bit more in depth. After all, how many Tribe documentaries will there ever be?

The public loves controversy though--and so time not spent on digging to the bottom of the stories of Tribe's early years was dedicated to the static in the group. The problem with that switch in focus is, in this case at least, is that when I tried to watch the movie from someone's eyes who had never heard of Tribe like, say, my parents, I could only imagine that they would walk away from the film with an image of a group of genius guys who can't work together due to a seemingly trivial and unclear dispute.  The emphasis on the break up leaves an unfortunate cloud of angst between the viewer's eyes and the screen. The movie depicts the group as essentially two guys--Phife and Tip--who have two drastically different stories regarding the group's split, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, shy and unable to sway either of the two, left to disappointedly watch Q-Tip yell and scream, and Jarobi, who loves all the other three dearly, and is also sort of left to the side as a bystander to helplessly watch the beef between Phife and Tip.

My one qualm with the movie is that it focused too much on the post-mortem, "I hate him, he hates me" kind of stuff, rather than the times when, according to Pharrell, "nothing was touching Tribe...nothing." As a fan of the group, that stuff was hard to watch. The four started out as an unstoppable crew: "When you passed the ball, you didn't have to look" says Phife at one point, when speaking on the impenetrable trust that existed between the quartet.  Perhaps the movie was a search for the answer to the question of whether there will be another Tribe album or not. To me, while I truly and sincerely hope that there will be one, nothing could have made clearer to me the dwindling likeliness of such an event than seeing Phife, hunched on a staircase in his own house, talking about his future and saying that "in the direction it's going, I could do with or without it [hip hop]." To see a man who was once a teenager who was chomping at the bit and jumping on the mic with fervor say something like that, that he could live without the genre of which he is a forefather, was pretty powerful. (Honorable-mention-powerful-moment: I had no idea the kind of relationship Jarobi and Phife had, and I was really struck when Jarobi revealed he basically moved in with Phife Diggy and became his caretaker.)     

When I left the theater though, I was happy. As were the four people with whom I saw the movie. It was well made, the stories are compelling, even if they are a bit disappointing, and the personalities are absolutely fascinating. If documentaries are meant to inform and inspire interest in their subject, this one was a success. I am confident that many people, even the "old-school" fans of Tribe learned a lot during the movie, and as far as inspiring interest, well, mine was already inspired, but for what it's worth, before I knew it, I was a few blocks away walking towards the T with "Can I Kick It?" pulsing through my headphones.