In Hanif Abdurraqib’s daringly structured third book, “Go Ahead In the Rain: Notes to A Tribe Called Quest,” the poet and cultural critic attempts to unpack the titular hip-hop outfit’s legacy through the lens of his experience as a lifelong fan.

Late in the book, he recounts the artists’ appearance at the 2017 Grammy Awards to promote their final and arguably most overtly political offering, “We Got it From Here … Thank You 4 Your Service.” Reeling from Donald Trump’s surprising election victory and his subsequent attempt to enact a Muslim travel ban, the music industry seemed unsure of how to strike an appropriate tone.

Q-Tip, still grieving the relatively recent death of Phife Dawg, his lifelong friend and partner MC in A Tribe Called Quest, opted for militant defiance. Dressed in black and flanked by longtime Tribe collaborators Busta Rhymes, Consequence and Anderson Paak, along with a squad of black-clad dancers, Q-Tip did his best to fill up the stage, injecting vitality and vitriol into an otherwise stuffy, over-choreographed event. The audience, though clearly energized by the performance, seemed mostly confused.

In a frustrating postscript for the group, the album was not nominated for a Grammy in 2017 despite its commercial and critical success, sending Q-Tip to social media to decry the institution’s failure to recognize the group’s contributions in a now infamous rant. Although the debacle came late in its run, it is one of many examples Mr. Abdurraqib cites to bolster his argument that, throughout the group’s lengthy career, it was never given its due outside the hip-hop community, even though its myriad contributions within it reverberated into the wider world.

In framing A Tribe Called Quest as underdogs, Mr. Abdurraqib gets at what made the group great. More specifically, in “Go Ahead in the Rain,” the author gets at what made A Tribe Called Quest great to him when he was a kid struggling to find his place and his voice. “I was a shy and nervous kid, wracked with anxiety before I understood what anxiety was,” he writes.

Mr. Abdurraqib offers a level of historical understanding that only a passionate fan could deliver. He astutely contextualizes A Tribe Called Quest’s position on hip-hop’s shifting terrain at any given moment in its run and writes insightfully on little-discussed aspects of the group’s history, ranging from the workings of the Afrocentric and sprawling Native Tongues collective from which it drew support (along with the likes of De La Soul and Queen Latifah) to the inspiration that Q-Tip drew from Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” album.

For all his mastery of the subject, Mr. Abdurraqib writes to tell his own story. He covers a lot of ground, but his real achievement is in the erasure of distance between artist and audience. His critical accounting is interspersed with personal letters addressed to Q-Tip, Phife Dawg and other figures in the group’s orbit over the years. Running the gamut from fawning to reproachful, written with vulnerability, and at times uncomfortable familiarity, these letters can be tough to read. He writes to these artists as they are to him, making the point that to consume art is to know the artist, even if only in a limited aspect.

Mr. Abdurraqib tells another Grammy story in his book. In 1989, the first year to feature the best rap performance category, many hip-hop artists boycotted the ceremony in protest of the award presentation not being televised. These artists partied together, apart from an institution who would have them contort themselves to fit some notion of commercial respectability.

To the mainstream, hip-hop’s legitimacy was hard-earned from the beginning, defined, it would seem, by its otherness. In its nascent years, it was made in the margins. It challenged the maker to stretch limited means to their furthest reaches, as in the art of sampling, for example.

“Hip-hop’s architecture was based on extending the sounds laid by other hands,” he writes.

For someone like Mr. Abdurraqib, who grew up feeling average but was eager to see and be things greater than the status quo, Tribe’s appeal was obvious. Absent popular acceptance, it drew strength from within its close-knit ranks. A Tribe Called Quest had its own ambitious vision of what hip-hop could be and kept its own council in realizing it. The strength of this vision, often at odds with prevailing trends, kept Tribe doubly out of step with its peers and the wider pop culture landscape. But if you got it, you got it down to your core.

In this context, it is easy to to see its appeal to a writer like Mr. Abdurraqib, whose first two books explored similar themes through poetry and cultural criticism. A Tribe Called Quest offered puzzles to parse and techniques to emulate.

Ian Thomas is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.

First Published: March 4, 2019, 5:19 p.m.