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http://www.nypress.com/article-22620-the-hip-hop-divide.html
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest
Directed by Michael Rapaport
Runtime: 95 min.
Remember the movie Brown Sugar? Of course you don’t. That’s because its premise—the culturally unifying love of hip-hop—is not, in itself, sufficient to sustain a movie. The same problem occurs with Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. Director Michael Rapaport (lead actor of the interracial jungle fever movie Zebrahead) professes his generational love of hip-hop without the doc-making “skills” to explain why hip-hop transformed global attitudes toward black youth or why ATCQ personified universal hipsterism during the same era that mainstream media was lionizing grunge. This rift signaled the beginning of pop music’s still-existing cultural fragmentation. ATCQ suffers a more personal rift.
Beats, Rhymes & Life flubs both histories, a misperception summed up during an interview with Barry Weiss, the head of Jive Records recording label (one of the boutique companies like the wonderful Profile Records) who gambled on hip-hop’s success. Weiss recalls ATCQ’s impact as “aduration.” His malapropism combines “admiration” with “adulation,” the peculiar circumstance of hip-hop’s ethnic and artistic revolution during the 1990s. Rapaport’s gaffe similarly mis-appreciates this revolution. Beats, Rhymes & Life gives a cursory view of ATCQ’s story. The film isn’t sufficiently detailed or probing to explain how Tribe fit into the moment of hip-hop’s zenith (they debuted after Public Enemy and De La Soul created the genre’s masterpieces) or how Tribe’s distinct, quasi-jazz sound was part of an cultural renaissance that illustrated a new, African-American grassroots intellection, typified by the Native Tongues collective that included ATCQ, The Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Monie Love, Queen Latifah, Leaders of the New School and Busta Rhymes.
Tribe’s music takes a backseat to power struggle and personality conflict. Group leader, Q-Tip (Jonathan Davis) and co-lead rapper Phife Dawg (Malik Taylor) were both soft-voiced hip-hop-heads but their subtle differences—sartorial cool vs. streetwise wit—created an unspoken rivalry. Rapaport captures the flare-up long after the group had disbanded and Phife had undergone medical problems—they clash during a 2008 Rock the Bells reunion tour.
Unable to explore psychology, personality or aesthetics, Rapaport has no story to tell. Anvil: The Story of Anvil is the great document about the unifying love of pop music, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster had moments of stark, clear conflict. But Beats, Rhymes & Life is hardly more than a video scrapbook—one with uneven lighting and amateurishly blurry camerawork. Fatally, no unifying structure means it lacks a beat, rhyme and life. Best to revisit ATCQ’s several inventive music videos (especially Scenario and Electric Relaxation), the finest documents of a movement.
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When you are born, you cry, and the world rejoices. Live so that when you die, you rejoice, and the world cries.
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You cannot hate people for their own good.
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