“Poignant and powerful, complex and melancholy… Michael Rapaport’s riveting hip-hop documentary gets uncomfortably close to A Tribe Called Quest, one of the most important and influential groups of the past 25 years.” — AV Club
An excellent look at the past, present and possible future of one of the most influential hip hop acts of all time.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2011
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest 2011
“It’s at once a loving, magnetic and gloriously alive tribute to a golden age when a group of brilliant black men and women barely out of their teens joined forces to reinvent hip-hop in their own funky, Afrocentric image under the banner of Native Tongues, but it’s also the most penetrating psychological study of a creative partnership in perpetual peril since Metallica: Some Kind of Monster… Rapaport smartly focuses on the yin-and-yang duo of Q-Tip and Phife Dawg. The group’s lead rappers are a study in contrasts. Phife Dawg is heartbreakingly vulnerable, a mild-mannered, sweet-natured little man with an excitable, girly voice and a debilitating case of diabetes… Q-Tip, who has understandably ambivalent feelings about the film, emerges as Phife’s polar opposite, a quietly authoritarian bohemian control freak and musical genius.” — Nathan Rabin, AV Club