Twelve years is a long time to wait for any artist, let alone one of the most gifted artists of his generation. How many times in the intervening years had it been reported that he was back in the studio, that he was working on new material and that it was sounding great, only for that hope to be dashed? Many fans had stopped holding their breath. So too had his record label and even his musical sparring partners like The Roots drummer Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson and Grammy-winning Raphael Saadiq, who would visit a reclusive D’Angelo in his house in Richmond, VA. It seemed this musical genius might never get over his ‘Prince of Denmark phase’, as Saul Williams once described it.

Naturally, when tickets for the London show did go on sale, they were all snapped up in a matter of hours. If he didn’t show  – it seemed a distinct possibility – people could always get their money back. But if he did show, would we be treated to the same D’Angelo who exited stage right in 2000, on the back of his magnum opus, Voodoo? That was the question on everyone’s lips. That and, of course, what he looked like these days. It was public knowledge that he’d been struggling with his demons. When that infamous mug shot circulated on the web in 2005 following his arrest for a series of minor offences, it was difficult to believe this was the same man whose live shows were often drowned out in the noise of screaming female fans.

So just which D’Angelo had turned up for his Brixton Academy appearance? At first it was impossible to tell since his show began in a thick fog of red lights. The music struck up. Pino Palladino on bass, walking a groove. Rimshots clattering off the snare drum. ‘Playa, Playa’, the hook, sung in four-parts by the backing vocalists. And that voice, his voice, barely audible above the thick stew of sounds. When the red mist did clear, and the spot lights dropped down from the vaulted arches, there was D’Angelo, buried in clothing, like a pirate warlord just stepped off the mothership – hat, jacket, shredded shirt, chains around his neck – stood at the microphone, guitar hanging stiffly over his shoulder.

His band, The Tesimony, cut a motley crew. The rhythm guitarist and male backing vocalists were clad in Black Panther-era berets and leather jackets, and more than once punched the air in black power salutes. To his left was Jesse Johnson of Minneapolis funk outfit The Time, on electric guitar, bringing a new compass point to the D’Angelo sound since his last tour in 2000. If during that Voodoo tour (managed by Alan Leeds, who’d organised James Brown concerts in his heyday, and Prince’s Purple Rain tour), D’Angelo brought the funk, pure and slick, a non-stop flood of energy, this new incarnation was more varied, with both light and shade, intensity and respite.

Over the course of some two and a half hours, the band’s set-up chopped and changed, as D’Angelo jumped from the front of the stage to the raised platform at the back where he serenaded the audience from behind a Yamaha organ. At other times, the whole band left the stage, only for the spotlight to fix on the keyboard player, or a solo from bassist Pino Palladino and drummer, Chris ‘Daddy’ Dave. D’Angelo has always attracted the best talent around him, and tonight was no exception. Here was a band drilled with almost military precision. At a time when the majority of black artists signed to major labels are rappers with Jesus complexes, you forget how rare it is that you get to see a band just jam.

It’s been said that D’Angelo had been struggling to find a new direction after Voodoo, which saw him come into direct conflict with his record label which didn’t have the patience for artistic awakening. When he tested out some of his new material on the audience at Brixton, it was a fuzzier, funk rock sound, owing more to Jimi, Sly Stone, Bootsy Collins, and, on tracks like ‘The Charade’ with its offkey chords, especially Prince.

His version of ‘Shit, Damn, Motherfucker’, a track off his debut album Brown Sugar, was perhaps most indicative of the change from D’Angelo of old. The song is a vaudeville tale about a man finding someone in bed with his wife. When he performed it in 2000, it was an 8-minute litany of fury, and the song culminated in a crime of passion. This time, though, it was more ponderous, dare we say unhinged. Could we even detect a little, deranged laugh towards the end of the track? It was as if this was a devil he knew a little better today than he did back then.

As mesmerising as the show was, it was hard to refrain from attempts to judge the spiritual well-being of the artist from the figure he cut on stage. Like so many of the greats he deservedly earns comparisons to, he’s paid the price for artistic success, and tonight we had come to judge just what cost has been.

Strangely, D’Angelo had been aware this devil’s pact, even from his childhood. Interviewed in 2000 for Swedish radio, he talked about strange dreams in which he’d receive warnings from deceased artists: “Maybe in some way or another, somebody’s trying to communicate to me, to let me know that ‘Hey I’ve made some mistakes, watch out for this so you don’t make the same mistakes.’” He then went on to talk about Sly Stone –“I see him in one instant, you know, pre-Stand album, and after There’s A Riot Going On – there’s almost two different Sly’s. It’s funny how this business, this music business, can do that, can make someone go through that transformation.”

Yet, on the basis of his comeback show, the intervening years have not diminished D’Angelo’s musical prowess one bit. He’s nothing if not an extraordinary all-rounder, and not only does he write astounding songs, he’s also blessed with a voice to melt the frostiest of hearts. When he jumped behind the organ and serenaded the audience with a medley of stone cold classics like ‘Cruisin’’ and ‘Me And Those Dreamin’ Eyes of Mine’, ‘Africa’, ‘Spanish Joint’, he reminded us just why he’s in a league of his own.

The biggest cry that evening was reserved for ‘Untitled (How Does It Feel?)’. It’s a favourite with the ladies, not least for that infamous video where he appears to stripped down to his birthday suit. But just before launching into the first verse, he stood up from the keyboard, and a flicker of emotion crossed his face. It’s no secret that the video inflicted deep emotional wounds on a sensitive artist in his mid-20s. Whenever he took to the stage, his music would be drowned out in a sea of screams from his legion of female fans. D’Angelo began to seriously question the motives for his fans’ adulation, and sensed the price for which success had to be bought. In that split second at Brixton, as the screams rose up from the auditorium, you imagined the thought enter his head, then disappear again as he launched into the song.

What we all wanted to know, though, was how did it feel for him? What was it like being on stage again? What was it like having 5,000 people standing there waiting for an encore, nobody moving an inch? D’Angelo must have been anticipating of this day for years. Did it live up to expectaiton? Did it disappoint? Langston Hughes’ best known poem asks the question: what happens to a dream deferred? “Maybe it sags like a heavy load? Or  does it explode?” D’Angelo has carried the weight of expectation for years, and struggled to cast it aside. But on the strength of his shows, and with an album surely to follow, this dream deferred may now well and truly explode.

To download the full audio from the show visit Funk It

Gil Scott-Heron’s final opus, one that he was working on intermittently for the last two decades of his life, is not an album of music but a memoir. Autobiography isn’t quite the right word, because this book pulls down the shutters and closes shop in 1981, the mid-point in his fascinating life, leaving the artist in suspended animation.

He’s right at the height of his fame, and has just been asked to join Stevie Wonder on his Hotter Than July tour (see YouTube clip below). Bob Marley had initially been billed as the support act, but was hastily hospitalised when the cancer in his toe began spreading to the rest of his body. So Gil, who had originally been booked to play only the first dates of the tour in Texas and Louisiana, was drafted in for the whole 16-week tour.

The tour climaxed with the Rally for Peace on January 15 1981 in Washington D.C. Organised by Stevie Wonder to support the campaign to have Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday recognised as a national holiday, that Rally, and the song accompanying the campaign, ‘Happy Birthday’, forced the politicians’ hand. In a neat instance of dramatic irony, it was Ronald Reagan who signed the national holiday into law in 1983.

Reagan, or ‘Raygun’ as he was fond of calling him, was the butt of a stream of jokes by Gil Scott-Heron, the poet and provocateur who held up a mirror to America and told people what was really going on. He was the thorn in side of the politicians and he was the poet of the ordinary folk, singing about their hopes and dreams. But to actually change the statute books, irrevocably – like Stevie had set out to do – that, for Gil, was the point of the struggle.

What a previous generation, the likes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, had set in motion, drove Gil to write, to teach and to perform. And when Gil finds himself on stage in the National Mall, where Martin Luther King, Jr. had been in 1963 to deliver his ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, he looks up: “And I could see for the first time, I could see what this brother had seen long before, what really needed to be done.”

How he got to that point there is what The Last Holiday sets out to tell. It begins in Jackson, Tennessee where Gil was raises up by his grandmother, Lily Scott – “[Jackson] was where I began to write, learned to play piano, and where I began to want to write songs.” The picture Gil paints of his grandmother is of a remarkable Southern matriarch, church-going, upright, and though never educated herself, a woman who had insisted on teaching Gil to read from a young age. They would pick out chapters from the Bible every night, or in the Chicago Defender pore over articles featuring Jesse B. Semple, the character created by Langston Hughes. Segregation was still in force in the south, and after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, Gil was one of the first students to be admitted to a white school in November 1962.

Much of the first half of the book is given over to the education that Gil receives, moving with his mother to New York, where he gains a scholarship to the prestigious private school, Fieldston, and then to Lincoln University, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. Marshall was the first African-American justice of the Supreme Court. It was his victory in the Brown v. Board of Education that started the path to desegregation and left an indelible mark on the mind of the young artist.

But by the time he gets to Lincoln, though, it’s no longer quite the same institution. The school has become a co-ed that year, and Gil buries himself in the library. Much to the dismay of his professors, he insists on taking a sabbatical after his first year to write The Vulture, a murder mystery novel in the mould of Chester Himes’ stories. There’s a particularly evocative scene in the memoir when Gil recalls working in a dry cleaners on the outskirts of the university campus, typing away at his novel and getting college friends to read his work. The publishers agree to take on The Vulture, and Gil returns to Lincoln with a book deal aged just 21.

During his time at Lincoln he also meets Brian Jackson. It would be their musical partnership that would create so many timeless albums, from Winter In America right through to Bridges in 1977. And Gil’s already demonstrating his political colours when he closes down the university in protest over inadequate medical facilities after a friend dies on campus.

What the reader can’t help but notice is the unbridled confidence and the razor sharp wit of the young Gil Scott-Heron (“I’ve always been a lot too arrogant and a little too fuckin’ wise,” he would say on Don’t Give Up). He waltzes into publishing houses to demand publishing deals, or into Flying Dutchman where Bob Thiele, a teenage hero of his who had produced albums for John Coltrane, offers him a contract. He befriends with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Stevie Wonder often turns up unannounced to his shows, and there are scores of other famous encounters, from Sydney Poitier to Michael Jackson.

In the Last Holiday, the makings of Gil Scott-Heron are plain to see. As listeners of his music will know, the subject of his art had always been the world around him, regular folk scrambling together a living, and he tried to give them hope. ‘It’s Your World’, he told them. But in Gil’s late career, especially on Spirits in 1994 and that final album for XL in 2010, there was a return home. On that final record too he evoked Jackson, Tennessee and Grandma Lily Scott.

Still, for all he reveals, Gil leaves many stones unturned. There are those last 30 years, which are elided in a couple of inconclusive chapters; there’s little about the music itself, how the songs were written, what they meant. The story also tends to jump around in time, each chapter, in its brevity, has an almost parable-like quality. When the publisher writes at the end of the book, “We are greatly indebted to Tim Mohr, whose editing skills and commitment to the project have resulted in The Last Holiday reading as smoothly as it does,” you suspect that publishing The Last Holiday has been no holiday for those involved.

On reflection, what we’re left with is fragments, “jagged jigsaw pieces”, to quote a line from one of his well-known songs. His memoir may not captivate the casual reader, but for those who have been touched by the artist, either live or on record, The Last Holiday is the final chance to spend time in the company of a man who may not have changed the statute books, but whose influence is incalculable, wrought as it is on the hearts of those who heard his message.

The Last Holiday by Gil Scott-Heron is published by Canongate.

When I saw I’d missed this event connecting three generations of British MCs, from Asher Senator through to Skibadee and General Levy and right up to the present day with Riko Dan, Wiley, Stush, and even Lady Leshur, let’s just say I knew it wasn’t going to happen again in a hurry.

But now they’ve brought out a video so you don’t miss a single bar from that momentous show, and also get to peer behind-the-scenes interviews with many of the artists involved… well, it won’t quite make up for missing out the electric atmosphere that balmy summer night at Cargo, but it does give you a chance to see history in the making. Filmed by Rollo Jackson, he of Tape Crackers fame, you’ve got all the ingredients for the perfect stocking filler.

Get the video HERE

“It’s a warzone here,” is a phrase you keep hearing again and again in The Interrupters, a powerful and somewhat distressing documentary about the senseless violence in America’s inner cities and about CeaseFire, an organisation attempting to cure this sickness, one individual at a time.

The film was produced by Steve James, director of 1994 college basketball video-diary Hoop Dreams, in collaboration with author Alex Kotlowitz, whose New York Times article put James on the scent of CeaseFire and its brave ‘violence interrupters’ operating on the front lines.

There were 453 murders in the city of Chicago in 2009. The city is drawn along imaginary colour lines, and on the South Side, where The Interrupters was filmed, it’s not uncommon for 12 and 13 year olds walk around with bullet-proof vests under their clothes. Many students here are afraid to go to school where playground confrontations often threaten to degenerate into deadly battles.

It was in one such after-school fight that Derrion Albert, a student at Fenger Academy High School, lost his life. Clumped around the head with a piece of railroad track when he was caught in the middle of a fight between rival gangs, the honours student died on the spot.

The incident was caught on a mobile phone, and the video of Derrion’s death spread like wildfire across the national TV networks in 2009, prompting a bout of national soul searching. Barack Obama sent Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan to Chicago to attempt to formulate some response.

But on the ground in Chicago, it’s CeaseFire that mobilises its troops and dispatches Ameena Matthews to console Derrion Albert’s mother. Over the course of a year, The Interrupters follows Ameena and two other interrupters, Eddie Bocanegra and Cobe Williams, as they operate in the trenches of Englewood, Chicago.

When situations in the community threaten to blow over into violence, for instance immediately after a murder when there is a high risk of retaliation, violence interrupters will step in and defuse the situation, encouraging the aggrieved parties to resolve the issue through dialogue, not violence. The philosophy behind CeaseFire is that patterns of violence can be disrupted by approaching them as you would an epidemic – going after the most infected, and stopping the infection at its source.

So you find the violence interrupters, often with little regard for their own safety, intervening in gang disagreements, hectoring the teenage mourners at the funeral of another dead friend, helping offenders reintegrate once they’re released from jail or just performing acts of kindness for the most fragile teens, like Caprysha Anderson who is in and out of Juvenile Detention.

The success of the CeaseFire programme, which registers a 50% drop in murders in some areas, can be attributed to the fact that its violence interrupters all come from the community, and often have first-hand experience of the activities they’re trying to put a halt to.  Ameena, who breezes through tight situations like some Mother Theresa of the South Side, is in fact the daughter of Jeff Fort, one of the city’s most infamous gang leaders and was once herself caught up in the same tricking she now helps to put a stop to.

Critics of the CeaseFire organisation argue that it’s just a Band Aid, treating the symptom without treating with the cause  – those intractable problems like unemployment, poor education, and drug trafficking – but its defendants argue that by stopping the violence you open the pathway for a neighbourhood to heal, for the schools to get better, for the kids to improve their outlooks and for businesses to want to open in the community.

In Dreams for My Father, Obama remembered his own time as a community organiser on the South Side of Chicago, in the Altgeld Gardens public housing project where he helped provide summer jobs, instigated building repairs and removed asbestos from apartments. “Change won’t come from the top,” he notes. “Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.”

The Interrupters shows that change taking effect unquestionably in small but steady steps.

The Interrupters is out now on DVD
Read on for an interview with Ameena Matthews

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We spoke to Ameena Matthews, one of the stars of the film, over the phone from Chicago…

Watching you in action, the way you intervene in situations, the way you provide support to really fragile subjects, is awe-inspiring.
I’m very honoured to have that gift. Some people wish they could sing, some people wish they could dance, I just want to be able to be effective and help people change their lives. That’s my goal, that’s my purpose.

Can you tell us the latest on Caprysha who is going through a very difficult time in the film?
Caprysha is a hot mess still. She’s locked up still and she’s in the process of waiting to get paroled and look for housing, because she’ll be 21 soon and it’s no more Juvenile Detention Center for her – she’ll go into Illinois Department of Corrections women facility. But she’s doing good. I spoke to her last week and before the weather gets bad I’ll ride up there to where she is.

How do know where to draw the line with how far you get involved with these young people’s lives?
In dealing with people’s lives, and being responsible for their lives, it’s not like the shut-off 9-5 type of thing. So really they allow me to know what my boundaries are. Like with Caprysha, she’s wasn’t ready to make a decision to change her life. She had another run in her. She wanted to do it her way and see if it would work. So she let me know that.  There’s no  handbook on how to be a productive member of society. It’s just doing the right things for the right reasons, and if you’re still not doing that after our engagement, that’s cut off for me. I’m not going to harbour a fugitive. I’m not going to aid and abet illegal behaviour. So they let me know what they need – whether it’s just a kind word, or to get something to eat. Just taking baby steps. And then they might go ‘Now I’m ready to get my GED,’ or ‘Now I’m ready to visit my mom’ or ‘I’m ready to go make amends to people that I harmed in the midst of the drama that I caused’.

How do you deal with all the pain?
It’s hard to deal with all the pain, but I come from that background so I can i.d. with it. We, as a people, can write our own ending to the book. It’s going to take a miracle and blessings upon our people to get them to understand to change their mindset that violence is not a good thing. So you take it one day at a time, one youth at a time, or sometimes in my case I have five or six I’m juggling at one time.  If I can get somebody to put their guns down, and don’t shoot anybody, we can deal with the underlying issues, we really can. But if you shoot somebody and catch a murder, I can’t really help you.

Is the government doing enough?
I’m not a political person. I’ve just got to do my part and hopefully the government will do the right thing to get people education, food, housing. I don’t like to do the political type conversation about what the government is and is not doing. As a whole country, we can always do more. But people know from their hearts what the right thing is. To have kids not able to go to school, and not have proper health care, guns being dropped in our communities… people know the difference between right and wrong, whether that’s the government, the school board, or my neighbour.

With CeaseFire, is it the case that it’s the community that’s best equipped to solve its own problems?
We as a black people have been so abused all the way back from slavery and there are issues we haven’t dealt with, unresolved emotions, and it’s always a consistent burden put on our community.  And yes, we do have to fix our own problems, however some of our problems are not problems that we created.

KOKO Camden is a venue that takes me back in time, so it was the perfect place for a Tru Thoughts night, put together by Soundcrash, last weekend. Those red and golden walls refracted the sounds of strings and soulful voices, and made the atmosphere really cozy and sexy, assisted in no small part by all the friendly people in the place.

The night started with Anchorsong from Tokyo. He perform music like I’ve never seen before, using a MIDI controller and backed by a string quartet and that’s it. Recently signed to the label, he has previously supported Bonobo, DJ Krush and Daedalus, and played in venues like the Southbank Centre and the Roundhouse to name but a few. With a huge online following, all the Japanese fans were right there, at the front of the stage, to show their support. His emotive sound is powerful, blending deep electronica flourishes with hip-hop beats, that contrast with the tremulous melodies vibrating off the strings. His debut album, Chapters, is due next week.

By the time Belleruche appeared on stage, the dance floor was already pretty packed. The first time I saw the band was in a small festival tent a few years ago and they already had a devoted following. That was right after their second album, ‘The Express’, and I immediately fell in love with Katrin’s style, not to mention DJ Modest’s deft touches to the mix.

Their latest album ‘270 Stories’ has been a great success, with a sound that brought the band to brand new audiences, while still retaining their individual identity. On YouTube, the ‘Clockwatching’ video directed by Jamie Roberts has notched up some 250,000 views and the band seems to be on one permanent world tour. But every time I see them live, there is the same passion and enjoyment I saw that first time in the festival tent.

However good Belleruche were, the highlight of the night for me was always going to be the Hidden Orchestra, a band I only discovered recently. With a sound that is somewhere between Bonobo, who they have performed with, and the expansive sound of the Cinematic Orchestra, ‘Night Walks’, their debut album, is a spectacular offering.

On stage, with two drummers playing in perfect synchronicity, and most of the other musicians playing at least a couple of instruments, the Hidden Orchestra is a sight to behold. And I haven’t even mentioned the jaw-dropping cello and violins designed by Starfish. Their spellbinding performance was epitomized for me during one particular moment when, opening my eyes in the middle of the song ‘Wondering’, the people stood around me all had closed eyes and smiles on their faces while the band on stage seemed to play on in a sort of trance.

And the night wasn’t finished there… not even close. To my surprise, the legend Omar jumps on stage next to seduce the crowd with three slices of classic British soul. The man has been around and recorded with the likes of Erykah Badu, Angie Stone and Stevie Wonder to name just a few and always brings a touch of class to the stage whenever he grabs the mic. He’s just one of the latest signing to Tru Thoughts, showing that the label is become a real powerhouse in the independent arena.

What I love about independent labels is that they will only survive if they are innovative but also if they have an identity of sound, always working to help their artists grow and develop. That’s how I see Tru Thoughts, a big family with artists collaborating amongst themselves, making original high quality music for our complete and disarming pleasure.

Wednesday 30th November 2011 / 8.00pm La Bodeguita, London SE1

Directed by Oscar winner Leon Gast (ʻWhen We Were Kingsʼ), ʻOur Latin Thing (Nuestra Cosa)ʼ is simply the greatest salsa documentary ever made.

In the early 1970s, a group of musicians were about to take salsa music to the four corners of the globe – The Fania All-Stars. Centred around an incendiary gig at one of promoter Ralph Mercado’s fantastically popular Thursday night jams at the Cheetah in New York in August 1971, the film documents the raw Nu Yorican Latin sound at its zenith. Starring certified legends including Willie Colon, Ray Barretto and “El Cantante” Hector Lavoe and directed by Oscar-winner Leon Gast (ʻWhen We Were Kingsʼ), the footage is spliced with atmospheric street scenes on rubbish-filled stoops and crumbling bodegas in Spanish Harlem, documenting a city on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

To celebrate the filmʼs first official release on DVD by Strut Records / Fania, Shook and Strut present an exclusive London screening at La Bodeguita, a vibrant restaurant and venue in Elephant & Castle Shopping Centre, on Wednesday 30th November at 8.00pm. You can eat rice and beans and drink ʻtill your heartʼs content, just like at a block party in ʻEl Barrioʼ. And try to fight your feet from moving if you can.

OUR LATIN THING (NUESTRA COSA) + DJ Duncan Brooker (Strut)

Tickets: £5 door / £4 in advance at www.ticketweb.co.uk

It was mid-afternoon when Danny Brown and his manager arrived at the Magic Shop in New York City, where we were taping during the weekend of the CMJ festival this October. He’d canceled a handful of Midwestern dates as support for Das Racist to perform a couple special gigs and the man with the wing of wispy flinging itself off the side of his head was resolute in his near silence. He sat in a chair in the control room, as he waited for his instrumental tracks to arrive, with his cell phone cocked limply in one hand, head tilted at it without expression. He was wearing something of a red and blue letterman’s jacket, a baseball cap and a pair of brand new, vintage Air Jordan sneakers and he looked as if he were going to fall fast asleep trying to conserve all of his body heat. It seemed like this hour was way too early for him, but when asked if he was exhausted, he replied that he was alright, not tired at all. Asked if he wanted a cup of water, he nodded, and when it was handed to him, he chose not to acknowledge the act, but took timid and tiny sips. He was barely there. He wasn’t really sure where he was and he wasn’t really sure what was happening. He was there because he was picked up and delivered there, but then something incredible happened and Danny Brown became the Danny Brown that we hear on record. His tracks arrived and he was suddenly the brash and comically vulgar, one-track-mind rapper. He put on a pair of headphones, stepped up to a microphone and then unleashed a string of thoughts inspired by vaginas and tongues and what those two things do when they get together. He seems incapable of or unwilling to consider that there are many other subjects worth his time than – oddly enough for a male – performing epic and circus-like, attention-to-detail oral sex on any woman that wants it and smoking hay. Brown makes it explicitly know that he loves the explicit. He delights us with repetition, riding the subject matter into heroic and amusing places. Just when you think that there couldn’t be another way to hear about eating pussy, goddamn it if Danny Brown doesn’t make you eat those words. We find ourselves thoroughly amused by the man’s dedication to giving instead of receiving. It’s a refreshing departure, with Brown’s acts sounding like charity, like the man who might happily work a janitorial job, while others would find such an occupation beneath them. He endeavors to explore the subject in such descriptive ways that we wonder if might not be some sort of crotch scientist, someone who’s so much more than a rapper, someone who is doing all of this hard work for the betterment of mankind. He steps away from the mic, exists the live room and is gone without another word. Just a saggy handshake and something like an unspoken exchange that he’s got to get back to work. There’s more research to be done. There are more answers that he seeks.

Listen to the tracks here (sign-up required)

Somewhere around the middle of the 1980s, the media cottoned onto the plight of America’s ghettos with 2-minute spots on CNN and Newsweek covers – that is when they weren’t covering the AIDS epidemic, Donald Trump’s bank balance, a young whizz kid called Steve Jobs or that old red foe hiding behind the Iron Curtain.

What was the reason for this newfound interest in the ghettos that America usually prefers to forget? Was it because of the tide of crack that had torn out of the heart of the black community pushing murder figures to unseen levels? Or was it because groups like NWA had managed to find their way onto the stereos of suburban white kids, causing tabloids to scare hysterical hockey mums into calling for this new scourge of gangsta rap to be banned.

Whatever the reason, Hollywood was soon bankrolling a new spin on the gangster movie – the Hood movie – featuring the likes of Tupac Shakur, Ice Cube, Wesley Snipes as the rock-pushing ghetto entrepreneurs or gun-toting livewires in Avirex jackets with an axe to grind. The genre spawned a hundred movies, from Boyz in Da Hood to Juice, as well as countless Platinum certified soundtracks, though it began to wane by the mid 90s amid accusations that it was perpetuating stereotypes about young black males.

Next week, two classics of the genre are being released on DVD – Juice with Tupac Shakur and Omar Epps, as well as South Central, starring Glenn Plummer. We have one copy of each film to give away if you can answer the following question:

Which cult novel is the film South Central based on?

Answers to competition@shook.fm

People are always talking about golden ages – they imagine what it would have been like to live in the Chelsea Hotel at the time of Arthur Miller and Allen Ginsburg, or in the thick existentialist fug on the Left Bank in post-war Paris or meandering along the banks of the Nile in the time of Cleopatra. Personally, though, I was always more caught up with what life was like on Linden Boulevard in Queens, New York where back in the days Q-Tip and Phife Dawg used to kick mad routines.

Q-Tip and Phife Dawg went on to form A Tribe Called Quest – a group who for many symbolised the golden age of hip-hop. Approaching the artform in a way that few had dared try before, it’s only now, some twenty years later, that their impact can fully be appreciated. It’s a strange sensation to think the music you grew up with should, in time, come to be regarded as classic. But if you were in any doubt that ATCQ were the sort of group that only comes around once in a lifetime, confirmation lies in the new documentary Beats, Rhymes and Life: The Travels of A Tribe Called Quest. 



This is actor Michael Rapaport’s paean to this smart, fun-loving, mickey-taking, and life-affirming group consisting of Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and sometimes Jarobi, who for a while in the late 1980s an early 1990s took hip-hop to a place where it would never be surpassed – ditching the generic stereotypes for something altogether more satisfying, lyrically, sonically, but still made to move a crowd. 


From the opening credits of Beats, Rhymes and Life, this documentary will have any hip-hop fan licking their chops. The hand-drawn stickmen of early Tribe records spring into life as the Lou Reed bass line from ‘Can I Kick It?’ slides in. In the credits, you note with building excitement that the Music Supervisor is none other than Peanut Butter Wolf, and the soundtrack has been composed by Madlib. So far so good.

But while the bulk of Beat, Rhymes and Life is devoted to the golden days of A Tribe Called Quest – from those formative adventures on Linden Boulevard right through to the peak of their fame, playing on Letterman, hobnobbing with A-list celebrities and selling out world tours – this documentary actually takes its cue from the 2008 ATCQ reunion at Rock the Bells, a decade after they finally decided to call it quits. 



You may be aware that this 2008 reunion was no happy occasion. Much of that tour, in fact, was mired in controversy. So in the opening scene of this film, you’ll find Q-Tip in a wood-panelled backstage changing room after the final tour date in George, WA. Asked by the camera if that’s the last ever Tribe show, he replies ‘Oh, hell yeah’, with no tinge of regret, but instead a none too carefully concealed bitterness. 

In fact this Michael Rapaport documentary was originally supposed to be called Beats, Rhymes and Fights for all the politicking and the high jinks that went on behind the scenes both during the filming and in the build up to its release.

The rift involved Tip and Phife, friends since they were in shorts but who, for one reason or another, have fallen out spectacularly. They’re different characters – Phife the five-foot, hyperactive rapper with low blood sugar issues and the moral high-ground (“he’s just jealous,” reads one YouTube comment on the trailer), and Tip, the Abstract Poetic, the creative powerhouse in the group, but with a reputation for being a cool operator.

You can understand why Q-Tip hasn’t given his full backing to this film. Nobody wants their dirty laundry aired in public, and all the arguing, the bad blood, definitely isn’t flattering to either party; but it does give the story an edifying lesson about the strain of friendships, the different paths they take, and makes you reassess some of those pointless fall-outs in your own life. Backstage during the 2008 Rock the Bells tour there is a lot of unstated resentment. Occasionally it bubbles over, and when Posdnuos of De La Soul is asked on camera if this will be the last ever Tribe show, he can only reply ‘I sincerely hope so’.

It would be unfair to dwell on the bad blood here because, if anything, the film probably devotes too much time to it. The story that everyone wants to hear is another story – about how Tip, Phife and Jarobi grew up in Queens; then how Tip goes to Murray Bergtraum High School for Business Careers in Manhattan where he meets Ali Shaheed and the Jungle Brothers who were also enrolled there. The story of Tribe is incomplete without the story of a movement, the Native Tongues, with De La Soul, Black Sheep, Monie Love, Queen Latifah and Leaders of the New School.



In keeping with that story, the number of talking heads and cameos in Beats, Rhymes and Life is crazy – from DJ Red Alert to the Beastie Boys, Bob Power to Ludacris, Mary J Blige to Pete Rock, Bobbito and Common, Busta and Mos, all helping to push the story along, but also all happy to weigh in on the Tribe legend, to give it more colour, more credence. There’s their manager Chris Lightly talking about how he literally had to physically remove the masters to Low End Theory from Q-Tip’s grasp because, being a perfectionist, he was never satisfied with the finished product; or Hot 97’s Angie Martinez talking about hearing Bonita Applebum and the swoon effect this most unconventional of love songs had on the female contingent of New York City.

Any Tribe fan will enjoy hearing how the group developed their magic, but their journey is as much about what they did sonically, bringing jazz samples to the table, raiding their parents’ record collections for Minnie Riperton and Sly Stone, Martin Denny and Eugene McDaniels, Weldon Irvine and Freddie Hubbard, blending them to make a sound that hadn’t been heard before. It was a lo-fi concoction, beats hard but gentle, with drum parts that still leave producers like Pete Rock and Prince Paul scratching their heads two decades later. 

With Tribe, the sample game reached a whole new plateau.

But then to hear everyone from Pharrell Williams to Questlove put it on record that, without a shadow of a doubt, if it weren’t for ATCQ there would be no Kanye West, no Neptunes, no Roots… well, it makes you think. And if Jay Dilla, who rolled with the Tribe from 1997, wasn’t up there in the clouds, he’d be up there on screen saying the same thing too.

We’ve been waiting a long time for this documentary and in truth, it would have been hard for it not to hit the right notes. It’s a film made by a fan who happens to be a trusted Hollywood actor, for A Tribe Called Quest fans around the world, of which there are no shortage.

To be taken back to Linden Boulevard where it all started will fulfil many of those viewers’ teenage fantasies, but despite the euphoria in seeing just how far the band came, there’s also a tinge of regret as you leave the auditorium. It’s not that there’ll probably never be that last Tribe album still owed on their recording contract with Jive; that never seemed too likely. Rather it’s the question of whether anything will ever come close to Tribe again… and the answer has to be – probably not.

Read on: the Village Voice’s list of Blue Note samples mined by ATCQ

Kankick has been chopping drums with fellow Oxnard legend Madlib since Junior High, and was an original member of the Lootpack.
Fiercely independent, Kankick broke off from the Lootpack to form his own ‘Funk Farm’ crew, whose members included DJ Babu and God’s Gift. Honing his own unique sound over the years, Kankick’s production is still light years ahead of today’s contrived and static Hip Hop scene.

KanKick lives for the underground and has built a large cult following with his many and hard-to-find releases. Credited by many as one of the most under-appreciated and underrated, he’ll remain as one of the most respected.

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MegaKanSurface’ Kankick mixtape by Patch Lunch