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Forget finding a wife, I'm skipping the middleman and just buying a pillar of salt.

Life is just the time you have between cases of the hiccups.

This is a good interview and it kind of threw me to hear he was working with Megan Thee Stallion. I don't know if he produced her album but this sounds like it was way before she blew up. I've never really looked into his production work but this makes me curious who he's worked with that I never knew about. I've also wondered how much, if any, this movie had to do with the final album happening. I never really read much about what got them back together but I always suspected this movie helped a bit.

I had to give up on Unspooled early on. I know it's good to take a second look at sacred cows, but Scorsese one of my favorite filmmakers and it felt like Amy Nicholson just relished in taking a dump on him at every opportunity because he was over-represented on the AFI list. I didn't even get the sense that she liked movies, just that she liked having opinions about them. There were three or four episodes in a row where she accused male characters of being incels just because they weren't getting laid on screen and at that point, I was out. It felt like the attacks she was making were very personal, on the people who liked those movies, so it was very unpleasant to listen to. ANYWAY, I think the strongest sequence in Beats, Rhymes, and Life was when Q-Tip and Phife were recounting the same events that led to A Tribe Called Quest's breakup, but from their own perspective. When Q-Tip said in an interview "I don't have beef with Phife, Phife has beef with me," he felt all he was saying was that he had no beef with Phife. Phife, on the other hand, thought Q-Tip was saying, "it's that CRAZY Phife who's wrecking the group, not me!" I think they were both coloring events to make their own side look better and both being a bit unreasonable.... but both also kind of right. It was a great illustration of how two old friends who had made great art together could let their egos get in the way of forgiving each other over minor (or even imagined) slights. I just wish the documentary had more of that insight. Seeing how the band reformed to make another album and Phife's tragic death, I would love to see a film documenting their reformation and their reaction to Phife dying. There's got to be a great story there. Did it take the shadow of a best friend's impending demise allow the group to bury the hatchet, or was it something simpler? Did they just... start talking again one day? If not, who put them in touch again?

(now listenable)