Debates will rage forever as to whether A Tribe Called Quest’s second album is their peak, or whether that came two years later when Midnight Marauders dropped. The Low End Theory stays in contention off a lot of long-running goodwill for how revelatory it felt in ’91: it’s where Tribe quickly advanced on the smartass yet perceptive poeticism of their debut, sinking even deeper into full soul-jazz immersion (complete with an appearance by bassist Ron Carter on “Verses From the Abstract”) while Q-Tip and Phife solidified themselves as one of the best complementary-contrast duos in all of rap. And sure, the bookending tracks are priceless — “Excursions” and its bassline-of-the-cosmos nods to hip-hop’s cross-generational evolutionary traditions is an all-timer in the who-we-are-and-what-we-do rap-album openers, and “Scenario”’s rep as the decade’s greatest moment in spotlight thievery holds up spectacularly even before all Busta Rhymes’s raaah raaah like a dungeon dragon lunacy. But the whole album scarcely goes four bars before some immortal line or another re-embeds itself in your psyche. Even the stuff that’s dated to the point of archeological (beeper-culture breakdown “Skypager”) or questionably expressed when it comes to sexual relations (the pro-consent yet also horny-and-frustrated “The Infamous Date Rape”) has the air of youthful promise and progress to it. The rest of it feels eternal: the record-biz okey-doke warnings of Industry Rule 4,080 (codified on “Check the Rhime” after being deconstructed on “Rap Promoter” and Brand Nubian/Diamond D feature “Show Business”), the juxtaposition of playful confidence and ancestral reverence on their neo-bohemian jazz callbacks/calls-forward (“Vibes and Stuff”; “Jazz (We’ve Got)”), Tip’s ability to take a conceptual lyrical structure and run all the way with it (the 40-plus rhetorical questions of “What?”), Phife’s deeply specific yet relatable scene-setting (the teenage relationship drama flashback “Butter”) — all of this make for proof that while Midnight Marauders was great, this is the album that made that greatness unsurprising.

– Nate Patrin