Every once in a while it’s good sit back and ponder, cogitate, excogitate and maybe even haterate on some of the individuals who impacted your life in some way shape or form. While riding the school bus home one day in the 9th grade, this tall lanky kid named “Grady” let me borrow a 90 minute TDK cassette tape. I was suppose to take it home that night, make a copy of it and return it the next day. Bear in mind that my family had only been living in Atlanta for 6 months at best. We moved here from Miami, Florida, so I was still listening to original electro, miami bass, and Jam Pony Express mixtapes. How ever, my taste in music was about to go Broader than Broadway. When I got home that day I dropped the TDK into my JVC RC-838-W and got real familiar with the Linden Blvd chapter of The Native Tounges Family… A Tribe Called Quest. keep readingLong story short, my intro to Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed and sometimes Jarobi is totally credited to Grady who would later move on and keep things greater in Decatur. He did so by ditching the “Grady” alias for DJ Apple Jac. I felt guilty for the longest for not returning the tape, but after listening to The Low End Theory a few times I was over that shit.

Excerpt from atribecalledquestmovie.com “Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Story of A Tribe Called Quest is a documentary film directed by Michael Rapaport about one of music’s most influential and groundbreaking pioneers in hip hop. The story is told by the members themselves as they reunite after two years during the 2008 Rock the Bells tour to deliver sold out performances . On the tour they re-discover that their own personal differences may overpower their love for the group, countless, hard-core fans, and its ability to survive the pressures of fame, the record industry, and simply pursuing other interests in life. Rapaport, himself a hard core Tribe fan from the first album, panics when Q-Tip tells him “ this could be the last show” after mounting tension erupted at the event in San Francisco. Thus, begins a journey to go back and appreciate the huge contributions made by Tribe to the “whole structure of hip hop” as stated by Amir from the Roots, one of the many artists in the film influenced by Tribe’s unique sampling and layering of obscure jazz loops mixed with hip hop beats, as well as their playful but clever lyrics. Chronicles told of songs like “Scenario” and “Check the Rhyme” paint a vivid picture of what it was like coming up in Queens as young folks living and breathing hip hop in the early nineties.”

The PropMaster DJ Red Alert and Founding Native Tongue members Monie Love, the Jungle Brothers, Busta Rhymes and De La Soul are all on in attendance from the family side of things. Other retrospectives include Beastie Boys, Kanye West and Pharrell.

We’ll end with this banger of sidenote: Lord Quasimoto aka Madlib is master crafting the original score, while StonesThrow head honcho Peanut Butter Wolf handles executive producer duties.