A Tribe Called Quest - The Love Movement

By the time The Love Movement arrived in September 1998, A Tribe Called Quest had already announced they were breaking up. The record landed as a farewell before anyone had a chance to hear it as anything else, which is a strange fate for an album explicitly built around love as its organizing theme. It still debuted at number three on the Billboard 200, the group's second top-five entry, and went gold.

Production comes almost entirely from The Ummah, the collective of Q-Tip, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and a young Detroit producer then billed as Jay Dee, better known now as J Dilla. This was one of the first major-label showcases for what would become one of the most influential production styles in hip-hop: unquantized drums, warm and slightly off-kilter, minimalist jazz and R&B loops with all the air left in. "Find a Way" became the lead single and remains one of the smoothest things in the catalog, while "Like It Like That," "Da Booty," and "Steppin' It Up" show a group that had traded the wide-eyed bounce of Low End Theory for something quieter and more grown.

It has long been the least-loved Tribe album, which says more about the standard than the record. Two decades of reappraisal have caught up with it, largely because Dilla's fingerprints are now audible everywhere in modern hip-hop and neo-soul, and this is where a lot of listeners first heard them without knowing it.

This 3LP edition carries all 15 album tracks plus six bonus cuts spread across six sides. The proper way to hear the last chapter of Tribe's first run.