Michael Rapaport's A Tribe Called Quest documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest has been mired in controversy since it hit the theatre circuit, but that's not stopping it from being released on DVD and Blu-ray this fall. The music doc will be issued by Sony Pictures Classics October 18.
MTV's RapFix reports that the home release of the film, which documents the rise and fall of the legendary Native Tongues alums, features commentaries from each member of the group, director Rapaport and hip-hop notables like Pharrell, Pete Rock, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers and Common. Special features include deleted scenes, alternate and extended scenes and three featurettes: "Mike's Journey," "Bringing Beats to Life" and "On the Red Carpet at the Los Angeles Film Festival Premiere."
While Exclaim! commended Rapaport's "complex portrait of a band of would-be brothers navigating the fine line between art and ego," the band themselves have gone on record saying they're "not in support" of the film.
Though early reports had the troupe fuming, a recent Exclaim! interview with Tribe member Ali Shaheed Muhammad laid things out a bit more diplomatically.
"We're perfectionists in everything we do and we understand the culture and we understand the art form, we understood ourselves and we felt the music was not -- he [Rapaport] didn't spend enough time on the composition, on the music," Muhammad explained. "Periods of music that we were pulling from was as important as the way we compiled it, what we pulled away and sampled. He would say 'I've only got 90 minutes to get it done, I gotta shorten it up.' I felt there was too much time on the bickering and not enough time on the musicality of it. But other than that it's pretty fair."
While Muhammad and smooth spitter Q-Tip beefed publicly with Rapaport over how they were presented on celluloid, Phife Dawg seemed pretty pleased with the pic.
"How many groups got documentaries -- hip-hop -- being done about themselves?" he posed when interviewed by RapFix this past April.
MTV's RapFix reports that the home release of the film, which documents the rise and fall of the legendary Native Tongues alums, features commentaries from each member of the group, director Rapaport and hip-hop notables like Pharrell, Pete Rock, De La Soul, Jungle Brothers and Common. Special features include deleted scenes, alternate and extended scenes and three featurettes: "Mike's Journey," "Bringing Beats to Life" and "On the Red Carpet at the Los Angeles Film Festival Premiere."
While Exclaim! commended Rapaport's "complex portrait of a band of would-be brothers navigating the fine line between art and ego," the band themselves have gone on record saying they're "not in support" of the film.
Though early reports had the troupe fuming, a recent Exclaim! interview with Tribe member Ali Shaheed Muhammad laid things out a bit more diplomatically.
"We're perfectionists in everything we do and we understand the culture and we understand the art form, we understood ourselves and we felt the music was not -- he [Rapaport] didn't spend enough time on the composition, on the music," Muhammad explained. "Periods of music that we were pulling from was as important as the way we compiled it, what we pulled away and sampled. He would say 'I've only got 90 minutes to get it done, I gotta shorten it up.' I felt there was too much time on the bickering and not enough time on the musicality of it. But other than that it's pretty fair."
While Muhammad and smooth spitter Q-Tip beefed publicly with Rapaport over how they were presented on celluloid, Phife Dawg seemed pretty pleased with the pic.
"How many groups got documentaries -- hip-hop -- being done about themselves?" he posed when interviewed by RapFix this past April.
