Check the rhime.

As with many things, I am often a bit behind the curve when it comes to music. (My car radio is always locked on the oldies station for example). I caught on to hip hop when I was in middle school, at the height--or just after--of gangsta rap. And as with other genres, I find something I like, then work backwards. The first time I heard of A Tribe Called Quest was catching the video for "Award Tour" on MTV sometime in the early 90s. I was in love. It was not the aggressive and bleak stuff coming out of Compton at the time. It was laid back and jazzy; the video was sepia-toned. I bought the album, Midnight Marauders. That was their third album and, as I said, I had to catch up by going backwards.

That A Tribe Called Quest (and some of their hip hop brethren, especially De La Soul) represented an alternative to the harder-edged stuff coming out of either coast is not a new thought. In fact it's dealt with directly in Michael Rapaport's fascinating documentary, Beats, Rhymes, & Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest.

The group was born out of the lifelong friendship between two Queens boys, Jonathan Davis and Malik Taylor (later, Q-Tip and Phife Dawg). When Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Jarobi White joined, the lineup was complete. The doc revisits this formation, from the time Q-Tip and Phife were best friends as little kids through the former's attending of Murray Bergtrum High School in Manhattan, where he met Ali Shaheed as well as members of the Jungle Brothers.

The film goes even further, though, examining not just their musical legacy, but their personal histories, especially the strained relationship between Q-Tip and Phife. Like a lot of successful bands, there is a dynamic tension between its two founders that both animates the artistic identity of the group, but also leads to its inevitable disintegration. It's this aspect of the doc that makes it more than merely museum piece.

It becomes clear throughout the movie that there were two major reasons for Q-Tip and Phife's separation. One was the apparent emergence of Q-Tip as the leader of the group, which relegated the other members, at least as Phife sees it, to being regarded as the Supremes to his Diana Ross. The film does a nice job of never blaming either of the two for this fight, never taking a side. On the one hand, it's quite clear Q-Tip had his mind on greater and bigger individual things and his post-Tribe career would suggest as much. On the other, there's certainly a level of professional jealousy one could infer from the anger Phife displays in several of the interviews. Rapaport shrewdly allows us to determine for ourselves which is more true. It seems pretty likely that it's a combination of both.

The second factor causing fissure between the duo was less petty and of much more dire straits--Phife's diabetes. In reality, while the disease had some measure of fracturing the group in its first incarnation, it also brought them together--for a moment--and then led again to an even deeper separation. So as the group reunited specifically to help raise money for Phife's treatment, the close proximity only furthered and galvanized the animosity between the two.

Thankfully, the coda of the film offers a ray of hope for fans and, more importantly, for the friendship between Phife and Q-Tip. Phife not only has a successful kidney transplant but the group again tentatively reunites. The band will probably never be what it once was. They'll never have the impact they had in the early 90s. But at least there is the promise of these childhood friends repairing their relationship. And division is ultimately not the message of the band anyway--it's unity.