THE MOVIE:

Michael Rapaport's Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest opens with footage from the group's 2008 headlining spot on the Rock the Bells tour. The footage is slowed-down, though, accompanied by semi-provocative interview snippets. The sound is eerie, almost ghostly, but in a way that's appropriate--the picture summons spirits of hip-hop and lets them rattle around for a while, for old time's sake. The energy of the music crackles through every frame.

It is also a story of collaborative tension--seen from the beginning, as leader Q-Tip is shown, in a shaky, hand-held shot, despairing of the group and announcing its end backstage at the show. "I did everything I could do," he proclaims. "Twenty years!" And with that, Rapaport revisits those twenty years.

The four members of A Tribe Called Quest (Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and occasional member Jarobi White) all hailed from the boroughs of New York City, and came to love rap music during its first golden age in the mid-1980s. Their rise to success is duly chronicled--as themselves, and as part of the "Native Tongues" movement (with such similar-minded acts as De La Soul, the Jungle Brothers, Queen Latifah, and Monie Love)--the positive, Afrocentric aesthetic that was vital part of hip-hop music in the early '90s.

The Tribe released five great albums in eight years, but then they fell apart; "the chemistry was dead," Phife explains now, and the steadily-mounting differences between he and Q-Tip led to, in Phife's words, "a bitter break-up" in 1998. Ten years later, they reunited to headline Rock the Bells, and Rapaport's cameras capture that contentious period, seeming to document the conflicts blow by blow--backstage fights, beefing in media, creating an infectious disharmony (when members of De La Soul are asked if it will be the Tribe's last tour, one immediately replies, "I hope it is!"). The film almost becomes their Let It Be; there's a bubbling power in those concert scenes, which are shot up close and in tight, studying the complexity of what's happening between these guys.

Members of the group (particularly Q-Tip) were, early on, vocal in their disapproval of Rapaport's film; Tip's displeasure with it is probably understandable, considering how poorly he occasionally comes off. Various interviewees describe him as an egomaniacal control freak (Jive CEO Barry Weiss: "I love Q-Tip, but he's a fuckin' nut"), and his backstage ravings don't present him in the best light, while he doesn't do himself any favors with an offhand comment about "faggoty shit to say." What is most interesting in that scene, though, is how the camera catches a glimpse of Ali's face and holds on it while Tip goes off; this guy, caught in the middle, doesn't know what the hell to do anymore.

So Rapaport is clearly on Team Pfife. Does it make the picture feel loaded? Maybe, a little. But it also makes it dramatic, and to be fair, Q-Tip doesn't come off like a villain; he's just a hard-working and occasionally difficult artist, as countless others have been and will be.

And the gossipy Tip-said/Phife-said stuff is far from the film's primary attraction anyway. It's funnier than you might expect; Tip and Pfife do a back-and-forth about the Knicks and the Lakers that's uproarious, and the interview subjects (particularly Black Thought from the Roots) add plenty of levity. Rapaport assembles a remarkable group of artists to comment on the Tribe, those they influenced and those who influenced them, discussing with keen insight exactly what it was that made the group so fresh and new.

Video & Audio:

The film is a bit at the mercy of some less-than-pristine archival materials (not unusual for a documentary), but Rapaport's new footage--crisp, HD interviews and tour footage--is handsomely captured by the MPEG-4 AVC transfer. Those images are nicely dimensional and richly saturated, with handsome contrast and rich black levels, although grain is occasionally on the heavy side. But the real attraction is the 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track, which bursts out of the speakers from the opening credits ("Can I Kick It," of course) and never lets up. The music is simply infectious--the sound is dense, the lyrics are crisp, and the audio is well-dispersed, with a healthy workload for the LFE channel. Fans will want to crank this one up, loud.

English, English SDH, and French subtitles are also included.

Extras:

Director Michael Rapaport provides an Audio Commentary that is, no surprise, impassioned and engaging; his enthusiasm for the project is palpable, and while he occasionally falls back on narration, it's still a good track.

"Mike's Journey" (18:52) is a look at how the project came to be and how Rapaport got it done--some behind-the-scenes footage and outtakes, centered on an interview with the filmmaker. It sounds navel-gazing, but it's a lot of fun ("Chasing rappers can be hard," he admits). "Bringing Beats to Life" (10:20) examines the creation of the animation sequences, while "On the Red Carpet at the Los Angeles Film Festival Premiere" (5:12) is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

Six Deleted Scenes (25:06) and eight Extended Scenes (56:54) offer astonishingly little fat; Rapaport clearly just had an abundance of material, and had to leave some excellent stuff out. Both sections are worth a look. The film's Theatrical Trailer (2:22) and additional Sony Previews close out the BD-Livecompatible disc.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

Early on, in just a few minutes of screen time, Rapaport (and his editors and subjects) wonderfully evoke the period of rap music that A Tribe Called Quest came up in the heart of. The picture taps into the excitement of that moment in hip-hop music and hip-hop culture; it remembers what it is to crouch near your tape deck ready to hit pause when a good jam comes on (Ali even remembers the difficulty of tuning a non-digital radio). Beats Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is a breathlessly entertaining movie; it moves quickly and nimbly, conjuring up that wonderful moment and letting us enjoy it one more time.

Jason lives in New York. He holds an MA in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from NYU.