A Tribe Called Quest reimagined what hip-hop could be in the 1990s, elevating artful whimsy and unabashed romance over one-dimensional braggadocio. Tracks like their 1990 single “Can I Kick It?”—starting with that warm Lou Reed sample—continue to flourish in movie trailers and commercials today, resounding decades after the initial convergence of Queens visionaries Q-Tip, Phife Dawg, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Jarobi White. Joining the Native Tongues collective alongside Queen Latifah, Jungle Brothers, and De La Soul, Tribe sounded fully formed right from the beginning, deploying jazzy samples, boom-bap production, and bouncy round-robin rhymes that felt as contemporary as they did true. No wonder their second album, 1991’s The Low End Theory, made it onto Apple Music’s 100 Best Albums list, ushered in by the instantly influential single “Scenario.” Without overly sweating chart success, the quartet expanded their vibrant sound world on 1994’s “Electric Relaxation,” 1996’s Faith Evans teamup “Stressed Out” and 1998’s “Find a Way,” each an inviting inroad to a heady new album. You’d forgive Tribe for remaining retired after releasing five culture-shifting LPs in a single decade, but the surviving three members reconvened after Phife’s passing to present a weirder, wiser version of a classic American rap group at middle age—as heard on 2016’s “We the People…” and “The Space Program.”