The Hip-Hop Divide

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.