Documentary
The documentary surely seemed like a good idea. Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest was a documentary released in 2011. It was helmed by actor and first-time director Michael Rapaport. Rapaport was a longtime Tribe fan who thought there was no reason not to attempt to put a film together. Even in 2011, thirteen years after the group’s final album, there was still interest in them. If anything, the interest had heightened. They’d been gone so long, with only Q-Tip remaining very publicly active in music spaces over a consistent period during that time. The group, then, became seen as almost mythical. Their run in the early nineties was so distant but still something that was talked about, as if you had to have been there to fully appreciate it. Because their sound was so ahead of its time and concerned with pushing the boundaries of the spaces it was in, they made more sense in 2011, when the intricacies of multiple samples and a smoother sound template were seeping back into rap. Their old albums were being cited by rap’s new stars as albums that offered a way into the genre. And so, with that, younger rap fans were getting hip to them and sticking around.
Moreover, Tribe became a staple around the discussion about what “real” hip-hop was. This discussion becomes more common with each passing year, as hip-hop heads of a certain era age, and the genre becomes more watered down—something that happens to every genre of music as it gets older. Tribe’s music became a weapon—which was happening even before they split—used in opposition to the shiny suits, and then in opposition to more hardcore rap, and then in opposition to rap that people deemed to have no substance.
People talked about Tribe like they weren’t real, which they weren’t. Kind of. There would be Tribe sightings: headlining a festival in San Diego in 2004, or in a run of concerts in 2006, or headlining the Rock the Bells festival in both 2008 and 2011. Through all of this, however, there was never an understanding that the group was reunited. They were doing their brand of citizenship for the genre. A nostalgic revival kicked back up in the 2000s, and they could both cash in on that and serve the people who were craving it.
If you caught A Tribe Called Quest during any of this time, you saw a group that looked like it could, potentially, reunite. They weren’t playing anything new, but the energy they had was thrilling. During both Rock the Bells tours—but particularly the latter—Tribe was the main attraction. This, on a bill with other heavy-hitting acts from their era: Lauryn Hill, Snoop Dogg, Nas. The crowds would show up in droves for all acts, but most of the excitement was about Tribe. This was layered, of course: Lauryn Hill was erratic and elusive, and Nas and Snoop Dogg were still very much active creators of music. Tribe was the outlier, the greatest novelty act that could be found.
Their shows at Rock the Bells were crowd pleasers, though no one could deny that aesthetically, the group was very different. Phife was heavier, bogged down by his illness and a somewhat stubborn refusal to change his diet and exercise routine with any consistency. Q-Tip would be decked out in a high fade haircut and a leather jacket, despite the summer heat, a completely rebuilt look from his days in Tribe. Phife—remaining customary—would cover himself in an old sports jersey or T-shirt. There was perhaps no better metaphor for the direction of the group’s two main vehicles than this one: Phife, clinging to how people saw him then, and Q-Tip, dressing as a version of himself from the future.
Regardless of looks, the group’s on-stage synchronicity was as sharp as it ever was. To the naked eye, they were tight, well choreographed, and having a great time. They would rap lines at each other while nodding with approval, finish each other’s lines with energy. During one performance on the 2010 Rock the Bells tour, Q-Tip managed to lose his shorts, and he ran through the audience, jumping up and down with the crowd. Their shows in New York were particularly thrilling, with the group bringing out old friends like Busta Rhymes and Consequence to join them on stage to re-create some of their past glory. In a great moment at Rock the Bells New York in 2010, Tribe performed “Bonita Applebum” while the Wu-Tang Clan waited backstage for their time to perform. All members of the group gave in to temptation and began swaying along to the classic they knew, some waving their arms, some clapping on beat.
It was enough to make people forget that the group was apart for a reason. In the early 2010s, rap was even less familiar with the concept of aging than it is now. When rap first started, it was a young man’s game, but there was a point in the early 1990s when it seemed like the young men who started it might age into older men who were able to have viable careers well into their aging. But by the time the 2000s came around, that notion was largely shot. Rap had not only become an even younger man’s game, but the trends associated with rap had begun switching more and more rapidly. Hip-hop’s epicenter, as predicted, moved from New York to Atlanta, and with that came a shifting of sound priorities and a need to always be a step ahead of trends. A Tribe Called Quest was fine existing this way in the nineties, before social media and things like ringtones and streaming. None of these things would have stopped Tribe from having a lot of interest in the realm of new music scenes and communities, but it would have been harder for them to keep up at a pace they wanted to while also making music they deemed meaningful. This is what the real issue was. It wasn’t just that older acts were aging out of the genre; it’s that it became harder and harder for them to make music that would be both worthwhile to them and commercially impactful enough to sustain their making more music. A Tribe Called Quest was the best novelty act around, but they were still a novelty act, existing with so much enthusiasm, in part, because no one expected or wanted them to get back together and produce anything new.
The documentary seemed like it would be worthwhile because all of the members were still alive and in close enough proximity to one another. It wouldn’t be a story told from the depths of the kind of grief that comes after a member of a group has died and the group must put on their best face. Rapaport thought the documentary could be at its most honest by capturing the group in the exact space they were in. Phife, Ali, and Jarobi needed the tours and shows more than Q-Tip did, from a career and financial standpoint. Q-Tip seemed happy to be doing them, but he didn’t exactly need to be there. That in and of itself was a tension, one that had existed within the group for almost every iteration of their career: the idea that Q-Tip could be somewhere else, doing something else, but was there to carry the group again.
At the heart of any great music documentary, there has to be either tragedy or conflict. No one really wants to see the story of how a band got to be a band once and how they made a lot of money, lost no friends, and rode off into the sunset unscathed by the music industry. If I tell you that my homies and I weren’t homies anymore but had to stick it out for the sake of our shared investment in a thing we’d started, you’d want to know why. If I told you that my homies and I got so close to the promised land we’d imagined that we could rest our palms on the clouds outside the gates, you might understand why we’d want to get there again, despite the fact that it might not be the healthiest endeavor for us.
Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest is largely about sacrifice, but who is doing the most sacrificing depends on which lens you view the film through. If there is a single thing to be drawn from the film, it is that there is one member who stands in the line of fire in the name of the group. It has long been presented that Q-Tip had to be the person who solely answered for any of A Tribe Called Quest’s successes and failures, right or wrong. If there is a person who makes themselves large enough to act as the absorber of all a group’s trials, they also get to absorb more than their share of a group’s successes.
This was a tipping point for Tribe. Q-Tip took much of the group’s heat when things didn’t go the way fans thought they should—particularly after Beats, Rhymes and Life and The Love Movement, when Tribe was just a rap group and no longer an earth-shifting entity. Phife, Jarobi, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad were able to use Q-Tip as a shield from some of that direct criticism: Jarobi because so few people were aware of his role in the group, and Ali because he was so often behind the scenes toiling away. But Phife, whether he wanted to or not, got to use Q-Tip as a shield—the massive personality and creative reputation that Q-Tip brought to the table gave Phife a lot of cushion and comfort in silence. It was Tip who the press wanted to talk to, it was Tip who had to answer for any change in the group’s creative direction. It was Phife who showed up and rapped and could pass himself off as going along with the flow.
From another angle, Phife’s illness was suffering under the group’s rigorous performance, recording, and touring schedule. He was giving himself over to the group’s creative whims, particularly during the recording of Beats, Rhymes and Life, when he was shuffling back and forth between states. He was one foot out the door, ready to rest and recover with his own life, and then he was back again, thrust into the machinery of a group that he once wasn’t even officially a part of. And so, it’s all a matter of lens, I suppose.
My group of pals in high school were cooler than I was, by definition. They were good at basketball and I was just okay. They played football, and I watched from the stands. Still, we were cool because, at heart, they were close to what I was: a music nerd who loved ripping CDs from our computers and selling them in our school hallways for $5 a pop, less than what anyone could cop a CD of new music from the store with on release Tuesday. And I was cool enough, sure. But not most popular, by a long shot. Them hanging out with me did more for me than it did for them, at least in terms of reputation and how I could move through the treacherous world of high school. We had our bonds: staying in on Friday nights and eating pizza while talking about rap. Going to sporting events and sharing notes on girls in our class. It was the simplest of things that tethered us, but those echoed the loudest. It didn’t matter that their parents had the money to buy them expensive gear and sneakers, and that I had to work to keep up, sometimes sacrificing gas money or lunch. The things we do to stay close to the people we think will carry us through an entire lifetime . . .
We all decided to go to the same college, right in the city where we knew and loved each other first. In college, something shifted, as things often do. Because I was one of the few black kids at the college, and because of people’s fascination with that, I became of significantly more interest than I was in high school. Some of it was desired and much of it not, in retrospect. But at the time, it all felt good, or it all felt worthwhile. It felt like I was finally achieving the popularity I’d watched my friends revel in during our high school years. Now, to hang with me was the prize, and they were reaching for it. Them spending time with me or being seen with me was now more valuable. I would sacrifice plans to spend time with them in their dorm rooms, until I decided not to do that anymore. Until it seemed like too big of a burden for me to bear at this new and big school with seemingly new and endless opportunities for new friendships.
Eventually, we stopped talking altogether. I saw one of them, recently, in a city where neither of us lived, moving through a hotel lobby. We embraced, stiffly. We mentioned something about keeping in touch in a way that didn’t seem true.
I think, often, about love strictly as a matter of perspective. For some, it is something they are receiving from someone whom they might slowly be draining the life from.
The Tribe Called Quest documentary is largely about friendship. Yes, it is also about the historical movements of the band, and the group’s early days. But mostly, it’s about a friendship that is no longer working. Ali and Jarobi are there, of course. But, much like all of A Tribe Called Quest’s story, they are secondary to what happens at the center of it. The most painful and fascinating things to watch are the tense moments: a backstage eruption between Q-Tip and Phife, shot on a shaky camera in the dark. The reasons for the tensions are often vague, which would perhaps lead a viewer to imagine that the two don’t even know why they’re mad at each other anymore, that they’ve just been mad at each other for so long that it’s the only thing they know how to do anymore.
There’s something about this that is like love. The way we stay angry at family because we know that, in many cases, they’ll be the ones to welcome us back first if we need them to. I fight my dearest homies the loudest and longest because I know they’ll pick up my calls when I need them to. Anger is a type of geography. The ways out of it expand the more you love a person. The more forgiveness you might be willing to afford each other opens up new and unexpected roads. And so, for some, staying angry at someone you love is a reasonable option. To stay angry at someone you know will forgive your anger is a type of love, or at least it is a type of familiarity that can feel like love. It might be that Phife and Q-Tip were actually still angry, or it could be that they just needed the comfort of anger to see them through an otherwise difficult and trying reality in which they would otherwise be forced to love each other like they once did, in a past they might not have wanted to return to.
It is also possible that the tension stemmed from more obvious places: Q-Tip’s perfectionism, played out over the band’s entire career, and the fact that he was always seen as the group’s star despite Phife’s immense talent and show-stealing performances. Or the way that some sections of Tribe albums would devolve into showcases for Q-Tip’s abilities, long meditations and boasts and production tricks that left Phife on the outside, slightly forgotten. Even when Phife came into his own, it is possible that the group still didn’t feel like his.
The central fight in the documentary speaks to this entirely: It was sparked in a moment when Phife, weakened from dialysis treatments, puts an arm around Jarobi to hold him up. Tip attempts to energize the crowd, using Phife as a mascot. “Look alive, y’all!” he yells. “Look at Phife!”
Phife, not amused by his illness being used as a point to hype up the crowd, refuses to speak to Tip backstage, before the physical altercation erupts.
The documentary centers on the two of them, separately and together. When they’re apart, doing interviews, largely about each other, the emotional tone is different. Q-Tip is often defiant, telling the camera that he never asked for this, any of it. He never asked to be seen as the Almighty Abstract, and Phife just doesn’t understand. He’s also relentlessly cool, calm, and adjusted during his interviews, only flashing emotions briefly. Q-Tip, by that point, had been a solo artist in the public eye for so long that he’d almost built up a persona as armor. This doesn’t mean that he’s not as charming and unique as expected, but his interviews are almost a clinic in self-preservation.
Phife, on the other hand, is open and vulnerable. His grievances are many. He comes close to weeping in several scenes, the ones where he talks about his health, or how unfair it was that he never got what he felt was his due, or the many contentious points he’d hit with Q-Tip. When he speaks of these moments, his voice sometimes trembles, like he is acknowledging for the first time that he and his longtime brother are no longer brothers. Phife’s battle with diabetes is highlighted here, making him even more of a sympathetic character. By the time the documentary was being shot, he was full-on in the midst of a search for a kidney donor. The way his illness is handled doesn’t feel exploitative, but it still manages to be deeply heartbreaking. Through it all, Phife operates in the documentary like he operated within the group: quick-witted and sharp; confident enough to lie about how confident he truly is; delivering comic lines with ease. In the middle of one rant, Phife goes on and on about refusing to play Tito to Q-Tip’s Michael, before taking an aside without skipping a beat and saying “No disrespect to Tito” in a way that is both earnest and hilarious.
The documentary is a measure of how different the two are, and perhaps how different they’ve always been. Q-Tip, guarded and deeply thoughtful, as if he can see everything he has to lose hanging on the edge of every word bouncing off his tongue. Phife, surprisingly open and eager, like the little brother who finally got enough people wanting to listen to him.
But mostly, it is a documentary about friendship, and about the lengths we go to in order to keep our selfish pride intact, even if it means it’s all we have left. Even if the people we love maybe want to see some glimpse of it wash away. It is comforting to hold on to bitterness, because letting it go means you have nothing but the risk of not being welcomed back into the fold of friendship. In watching the documentary, one realizes that the main character isn’t the group itself. The main character is not Q-Tip or Phife, but it is the distance between them and their unwillingness to cross it toward each other, no matter how much a viewer roots for them to do so. They’re both stubborn and deeply sensitive in the film—Phife more than Tip at most points—but even in frustration, their friendship is painted so beautifully on screen it is worth rooting for its survival. To hell with the music, let the old friends hug and make up.
In December of 2010, Q-Tip tweeted denouncing the film. “I am not in support of the Tribe Called Quest documentary,” he wrote in response to a leaked trailer. As film festivals approached, Q-Tip began calling himself an editor on the film and saying he wanted changes. On a radio show in mid-December 2010, he said:
“I can’t really go too much into it but . . . people automatically assume I’m speaking just as the subject, that I’m not supporting it ’cause I ain’t like it. I’m a producer on the film, Tribe is a producer on the film. I’m speaking for the whole group . . . Different things need to be done edit-wise. The sentiment of the film is there, 80 percent is there, it’s just not done.”
Q-Tip, again, was making himself large and speaking for the group at large. He was concerned that the film was being rushed for the festival circuit. When Sundance came, Phife was the only member of Tribe to show up for the film’s premiere. The rest sat it out. In March 2011, after the film was acquired by Sony, Q-Tip, Ali, and Jarobi went on MTV and aired out even more issues. They didn’t get enough creative control or production credits. They weren’t offered the money necessary to travel to Sundance for the film’s premiere.
Rapaport was in full defense mode, laying out a business deal that he claimed benefited the Tribe both financially and from a creative control standpoint. He insisted that the group was just emotional about the film and the process that went into making it. He insisted that Tip, Ali, and Jarobi had only seen the movie on a computer screen, and once they saw it on the big screen, they’d be all right with it.
The release was a mess, but the film was still released to critical acclaim. It is difficult to watch, but there’s enough roots and “real hip-hop” nostalgia in it to satisfy even the most critical of hip-hop heads. It is a documentary about friendship made by somebody who loves rap. The fact that it was pushed into the world with a high degree of difficulty speaks to the Tribe’s legacy. Of course it was never going to be easy.
There is a scene that stands out like no other scene in the film. The most genuine and captivating moment comes in a shot toward the end. Standing to the left of the camera is Q-Tip, and to the right is Phife. By this moment in the film, they’ve spent most of their time talking about how angry they are at the other one in separate interviews, and speaking tensely to each other in person. The shot takes place in a Manhattan studio while the two are rehearsing for a one-off reunion show. When their music begins playing over the speakers, almost instantly, they break into a completely synchronized dance, as if they are sharing a single body. Q-Tip looks over at Phife, says the words “like this,” and Phife follows, right on time. The camera stays on them, and they dance, tethered to each other as if they’ve never known any other option. As if they were always going to find a way.