Making the Movie Day 2056

Movie Review Commentary: Beats, Rhymes and Life the Travels of a Tribe Called Quest

I saw Beats, Rhymes and Life the Travels of a Tribe Called Quest and I realized that what is passed off as a documentary has become so formal and thus formulaic that the whole paradigm of what one should expect from a documentary, photographically and narratively has got to be changed. There was no reason for such positive Black story to be so mishandled (from an aesthetic perspective– not even getting into how Michael Rappaport did them dirty on the business side).

A Tribe Called Quest is one of the Black community’s cultural treasures and it was sad to see them treated as if they were only worthy of a soap opera that didn’t even go in depth into what makes them important– THEIR MUSIC. Literally half the movie was about the beef between Phife and Tip, which doesn’t even seem to exist anymore. Plus it looked like it was shot on a phone.

The animation was dope though, so props to whoever did that. This film was also an excellent reminder of ATCQ’s genius and a reminder about how we don’t have anything like that anymore in Black music from the male perspective. We don’t have male Black musicians pushing the FORM en masse like it used to be.

Gotta push the form