Review: Beats, Rhymes & Life

Lights flash disco-style on a middle-aged Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad as the three harmonize in front of a pumped audience for the 2008 Rock the Bells Festival. The crowd is hyped. The camera pans across an audience of bobbing heads and swaying arms.

This is how the new documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life: The Travels of a Tribe Called Quest, directed by actor Michael Rapaport, opens. Despite the controversy that has threatened to eclipse this new film — reports surfaced that Q-Tip didn’t attend the Sundance premiere in protest of the project — the scandal likely won’t hurt the project, instead doing the opposite, as die-hard hip-hop fans will want to draw conclusions independently.

The film makes an earnest effort to give the legendary hip-hop quartet its props, while critically looking at reasons for the band’s breakup. Though group member Jarobi White is a part of the cast, it’s revealed that his real passion is culinary arts, paring the group down to a threesome: Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad.

Candid scenes reveal Kamal “Q-Tip” Fareed’s outsized ego, his perfectionist leanings and ambition that eventually spark a petty beef between Q-Tip and Phife Dawg that Rapaport captures dramatically on film backstage at the Rock the Bells Festival.

In truth, Beats is a documentary within a documentary.

The 98-minute documentary film is evenly split. The first half of the film establishes the history — how ATCQ met, where they went to school, how they got their start. The early footage — interviews, early concerts, house parties — recreate the early days of hip-hop pre-stardom. The second half of the film is more exposé, however, focusing on the internal tension within the group that ultimately causes their fall.

To continue reading, click here.

By the Way, Sanaa Lathan is Back on Stage

photo credit: Joan Marcus

Sanaa Lathan has fashioned an enviable acting career going back to the 1990s. All hands down, her most beloved movie is Love & Basketball. Since then she’s amassed an impressive resume with a diversity of characters in film, television, and theater. Theater has been the recent focus of her career, a throwback to her training at the prestigious Yale School of Drama, which earned her a Tony award nomination for her portrayal of the sassy Beneatha in A Raisin in the Sun.

theGrio spoke with Sanaa Lathan about her recent hiatus from films to focus on once-in-a-lifetime roles in theater, what its like being a black actress in Hollywood today (setting the record straight about a couple of things), and what she’s working on next.

By the Way, Meet Vera Starks is playing at Second Stage Theater in New York City. The play which opens on May 9th, pokes fun at Hollywood while paying homage to black actresses like Theresa Harris who had so much more to give Hollywood but spent her career playing maids in mediocre films rather than playing leading ladies that their talent deserved. By the Way, Meet Vera Starks was written by Lynn Nottage, who won the Pulitzer Prize for her play Ruined in 2009.

TheGrio: How did you come across the role of Vera Starks? It seems almost handwritten just for you?

Last year I was in London doing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Lynn was there doing a play. We talked and she offered me the workshop for the play. I was excited to play the character from the moment I read it. What a great character to play that deals with real issues that we deal with even today and in the industry.

How did you prepared for this role — emotionally, physically, spiritually? I know this is a historical piece, any research you had to do?

We watched a lot of 1930s Foucault movies. There’s a great one called The Flame of New Orleans. There’s an actress named Theresa Harris who plays in this movie. Like Vera Stark, she made a career of playing maids. We watched a lot of 1930s screwball comedies. Thank God for YouTube! A lot of Ed Sullivan type shows with divas like Lucille Ball, Pearl Bailey, Judy Garland, and Betty Davis. 

 So what’s it like working in Hollywood? For the most part Hollywood seems pretty segregated. I saw many parallels with the play and the situation of black actors in Hollywood today.

All you have to do is look at what’s being put out there to see that Hollywood is like the last frontier. There’s definitely is a lot of inequality in Television and Hollywood. The one thing I’d love to see when I go to the movies is to see movies that reflect the world that I live in. Now when I go to the movies, I don’t see that. All I ask is that movies start telling the stories of the entire experience of America.

Read the full interview on theGrio.

By the Way, Meet Vera Stark!

Beat Memories

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Murillo Returns

Poet John Murillo (Up Jump the Boogie) will be in DC this weekend leading a workshop for Split This Rock and giving a reading at Bus Boys and Poets with KatyRichey. There are still spaces left for the workshop, I believe. You should contact Sarah Browning at browning@splitthisrock.org for registration or further details.

Here’s a clip of Murillo reading at the Bowery Poetry Club. I was very fortunate to be in the audience.

Looking for Poetry Outside of Poems

One of my favorite professors at Howard University, whom I’m still in touch with, once said that I should never look for poetry in poems: go out into the world and discover something that stimulates you. I try to live by this maxim. The entire week I was in New York, I carried my notebook with me and created a breathing ticker tape. Anything and everything that caught my attention I wrote it down, forcing myself to give it a name. This is the work of a writer, particularly a poet: to give names to things that aren’t obvious.

This is what I wrote my first day as I was staying with my pops who has a place on Far Rockaway Beach:

waves crashing

rain, wind

sea salt

music, grafitti

home

white castle

water running through earth

cemetaries crowded with chipped teeth…

This is what makes writing so interesting to me. How do I name something that is the result of two different worlds colliding?

I asked my Dad to accompany me to the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and it was one of the most stimulating museums I’d ever visited. There were about four floors. There was modern art, of course, but also avant-garde experimental work that I couldn’t figure out what was going on.

 See for yourself:

 Is this art? And what are the standards these days?

Two Women Staring at Each Other

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Blogging from New York City

For the entire month of April, I’ll be blogging for the Tidal Basin Review’s blog. I feel very fortunate as this will be their first month blogging and they are publishing one of my new poems. So please, support the Tidal Basin Review.

That said, I plan to post teasers of my blog posts for TBR on Words Matter. I hope you enjoy and continue to read!

Writers are obsessed about home. Well, at least I am. I haven’t lived in New York in over ten years. Yet each time I return those feelings fade away and I taste New York as if it’s my first time yet I’m familiar. Sorta like making love to an ex after years have passed.

Since Monday, I’ve been in New York City. Some people call this the Big Apple. The hub of the art world.  A great place to shop, and so on. I call it “home.” Each time I return to New York there’s an unselttled feeling like both New York and me are ghosts that are too restless to stay buried. I’m always amazed at how much takes place in this city. There was a Black Writer’s Conference in Brooklyn that I didn’t attend but I was able to connect with my good friend, Courttia, who came all the way from across the pond to be in the city.

Here are some things I’ve done so far:

I took my writer friend, Courttia Newland to Harlem for lunch at Sylvia’s.

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