A Solo Quest

NEW YORK — THE TANK-LIKE Mercedes SUV rumbled into Times Square one evening in late spring with all the subtlety of a space shuttle launch. It wasn't simply the boom-bip issuing at ear-splitting volume from the truck's bazooka speakers -- although the sound of kick drums that loud was enough to get passersby wondering, even complaining, about the person behind the wheel. You could see something else happening: hip-hop fans of all stripes having a "Hey, isn't that . . . ?" moment, connecting the music coming from the vehicle with its driver, New York "conscious" rapper Q-Tip.

The on-again-off-again front man-producer for seminal hip-hop quartet A Tribe Called Quest and one of the genre's most transcendent MCs, Q-Tip largely has kept to himself since 1999, when his last album, "Amplified," hit No. 4 on the national hip-hop/R&B chart. Outside of a scant few guest verses on other performers' songs (including the Chemical Brothers' European smash hit "Galvanize," for which Q-Tip won a Grammy) and dribs of production work for the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey and Mobb Deep, he's remained virtually silent. Rap aficionados, meanwhile, never forgot him.

Bathed in Times Square's neon glow, the Queens native nodded coolly in time with "Shaka," the first track on his eagerly awaited second solo album; a song on which the voice of Barack Obama soars over a crushing beat, intoning his message of hope and change -- a sound byte Q-Tip excerpted from one of the candidate's campaign speeches.

"I feel like Obama in a way," the rapper would say later. "His idea that hope means not shrinking from a fight; it's the courage to reach for something. My music is that. Those are principles I try to embody. He said it so eloquently, I thought it would be a proper way to start things off."

Appropriately enough, Q-Tip's first commercially released album in nine years is titled "The Renaissance," signaling both a reclamation of the spotlight and a rebirth of the hip-hop cool he helped create. But don't call it a comeback. To hear him tell it, he never really went away. He simply recorded several albums' worth of music without releasing it, waiting for the right cultural tipping point to reemerge on the scene. "Where have I been?" Q-Tip asked. "Working. Between you and me, I was waiting for the time to be right."