In the '80s and '90s, as Hanif Abdurraqib points out in his new book Go Ahead in the Rain, one of the rarest distinctions in hip-hop was to get a five-mic rating from The Source magazine. When the Source critics said an album was a classic, they were not wrong.

From 1988 to 1998, only nine albums merited the honor. They included classics by the likes of Eric B. and Rakim, Nas, and the Notorious B.I.G. Only one artist achieved two five-mic albums in that time span: A Tribe Called Quest, with People's Instinctive Travels (1990) and Midnight Marauders (1993).

The questioner in an author Q&A distributed with press galleys describes the book as "the first serious look at A Tribe Called Quest." The fact that it's true, at least with respect to books, is testament to just how far hip-hop has to go in getting the kind of voluminous examination accorded classic rockers.

It's apt, then, that the book isn't just a biography of the band, or an annotated discography, but "a love letter to a group, a sound, and an era," as the cover puts it. Abdurraqib mixes observations about the group with passages of personal retrospective and a rich description of the Tribe's musical context.

From their mid-1980s inception through to the present day, Abdurraqib suggests, A Tribe Called Quest have threaded a sort of needle. They came out of New York, but didn't get pulled into the deadly coastal battles of the '90s. They earned massive cred in the hip-hop world, but they found a wide audience of music heads, in part because of their manifest musicality and the distinctly jazzy textures of their early work.

The book opens with Abdurraqib relating his childhood, raised by jazz-loving parents who didn't approve of a lot of hip-hop but who gladly green-lit A Tribe Called Quest. The author compares one of the era's most notorious rap groups with the Jungle Brothers, a Queens group that gave ATCQ's Q-Tip his first appearance on record.

These two groups point out the ways that rap artists had begun to craft their own mythologies, like wrestlers in the ring: N.W.A. with their fearless, hyperviolent personas, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young white people most excited and old white people most afraid; and the Jungle Brothers, with their heavily Afrocentric imagery, tone, and aesthetic, rooted in some truth but absolutely rooted in some idea of what would make young black people most curious and old black people most welcoming.

As Abdurraqib relates, Q-Tip debuted his new group name on a Jungle Brothers song. On "The Promo" (1988), Tip raps, "My name is Q-Tip from A Tribe Called Quest."

ATCQ's first album, People's Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, was a document of a hip-hop collective known as Native Tongues, which also included De La Soul and Queen Latifah. Q-Tip masterminded the album, which featured Phife Dawg on only four out of 15 tracks. Abdurraqib is eloquent on Q-Tip's solo "I Left My Wallet in El Segundo," which hilariously reflects the rapper's ignorance of California geography. El Segundo is an L.A. suburb, it's not in the middle of nowhere as the song implies; Tip took the locale from a running gag on Sanford and Son.

It's the kind of debut single, Abdurraqib notes, that "defines who you'll aim to be going forward." It also "acts as a showcase for the idea that A Tribe Called Quest was going to be driven, largely, by Q-Tip's ambition."

It was Tip's partnership with Phife, though, that animated the group's two definitive albums: The Low End Theory (1991) and Midnight Marauders (1993). In a letter to Phife (much of Go Ahead in the Rain is addressed directly to individual group members), Abdurraqib likens the two rappers to basketball players.

"Tip is the conservative but skilled MC," he writes, while Phife comes "flying in from nowhere, a rush of colors behind you, throwing up everything like you've never missed before." The author argues that Midnight Marauders is "the most perfect Tribe album" because it found the two "most tuned in to each other's needs and desires."

The funkier third album, Q-Tip's answer to Dr. Dre's game-changing production work on The Chronic, was also the last Tribe album before the hammer came down. Starting in the early '90s, the record industry decided that artists would have to "clear" samples with the rights-holders...and pay for them. Never again would major hip-hop artists be able to replicate the sample-rich flights of fancy produced by the likes of the Tribe and the Beastie Boys at the decade's dawn.

The group stayed together for two more albums that Abdurraqib, as a fan, diligently defends ("being good is only a failure if you've been impossible three times in a row"). They broke up in 1998 with a cover story in The Source, yet another feat that would rapidly become a thing of the past as the internet took over the news cycle.

While the Tribe were often playful and fun, Abdurraqib points out what made the forward-thinking group finally start to sound dated was the rise of OutKast. Incredible rappers with songs that "sat in a listener's bones and forced a bounce out of them," Big Boi and André 3000 marked the rise of Atlanta as the center of the hip-hop universe and contrasted with "the hyperserious focus of Tribe — particularly Q-Tip."

There were occasional reunions over the years, until Phife died in 2016 due to complications of diabetes. Abdurraqib is among the many who celebrate Tribe's final album, that year's We Got It From Here...Thank You 4 Your Service. It sounded both vintage and fresh, and its relevance to the new era came sharply into focus with a "calculated, sharp, and most importantly, openly angry" 2017 Grammys performance that Abdurraqib refers to as the first "real political moment" in the awards' history.

The book ends with the author musing on whether there can ever be the likes of Tribe again. Can rap ever again feel as fresh as Tribe did in the early '90s? While Abdurraqib keeps his finger on the genre's pulse, he confesses that younger artists just don't light the same fire in his heart. "We may never have anyone as great as them again," he writes, and whether or not you'd care to argue, you can certainly see where he's coming from.

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