If The Love Movement felt like the exhausted (and eventually premature) coda of A Tribe Called Quest’s career in 1998, Q-Tip complicated the narrative even further by dropping his solo debut the following year and reaching out in directions that freaked out the mainstream-skeptical segment of his audience. But ignore some it was 1999, OK? fashion choices and a couple sexy Hype Williams videos, and Amplified feels — and especially sounds — even less like a sellout move now than backpackers might’ve feared back then. Instead, Tip leans just a bit further into his ability to get deep in the pocket of a hook — “Breathe & Stop” and “Vivrant Thing” being the big-single case studies — without losing the unpretentious charisma that made his flirtatiousness more charming than skeevy and his consciousness more welcoming than standoffish. (If “Moving With U” and the aforementioned “Vivrant Thing” hold to any particular romantic statement, it’s “you make me so horny I want to do right by you.”) It even holds when he raps about status symbols, “Let’s Ride” vibing off its Range Rover luxury in amiable ways that still sound good coming out of the speakers of a decade-old Camry. And the multi-regional overtures of “Go Hard,” which shouts out the distinct hip-hop cultures of the East, West, and South while sounding like it transcends all of them, was a necessary treaty proposal after a decade of Coast Wars. On top of all that, it’s a fantastic musical partnership with Jay Dee, who provided his last great work with his Tip partnership The Ummah before joining the Soulquarians. They drop their funniest trick right out of the gate in opener “Wait Up,” which starts with twenty seconds of trapped-hornet Atari-blip synths, only to erupt into delirious post-bop/art-funk at the very moment that intro threatens to become wholly intolerable. Then they go about refining the pensive-yet-bright jazz-rap that brought Tip to the table (“Things U Do”), emphasizing the Stevie-isms in the shiny suit era’s aesthetics (“Breathe & Stop”), exploring the Detroit-to-Düsseldorf continuum (“Go Hard”), and even finding a footing in KoRn’s nu-metalisms (“End of Time”) by foregrounding the excitement of that gnarled weirdness over its angst. Nowadays the only disappointment in Amplified is the fact it took Q-Tip nearly a decade to release a solo joint that could stand up next to it.