NEW YORK -- If there is one word that best describes rapper Q-Tip's state of mind these days, it's "love."

It's where he's at, he says. And where A Tribe Called Quest's music is going. And where he'll tell you that he thinks society should be headed.

"We do this for love," said Q-Tip, born Jon Davis but who now goes by the Muslim name Kamaal Fareed. He and rapmate Ali Shaheed Muhammad spoke recently from the Hit Factory in New York City, the studio where A Tribe Called Quest recorded The Love Movement, their upcoming LP that's due out in April or May. "We do music for love, and I think a lot of people do different things for love. I think we need to get back to that emotion."

But don't be fooled by the seemingly hyper-romantic title of Tribe's forthcoming album. There are no sappy, swelling strings, lyrics cribbed from an oversexed Hallmark card or sultry soul man Barry White clones overcome by ridiculous paroxysms of sensuality. "I think people have gotten away from [love] a little bit," added the 27-year-old Q-Tip, dressed casually in dark clothing. "So we just try to use that as kind-of like an underlying issue [on the record]."

Ironically, for all the talk about love, The Love Movement is matter-of-factly a stripped-down, butt-shaking affair that could be about anything from the love of friends, God, one's self or the thrill of creating guileless, party-down hip-hop free of pretense or excess.

To achieve this end, bass player Muhammad, 27, said the group, including the absent Phife -- a.k.a. Malik Taylor, also 27 -- used more live instrumentation on the new album. In addition to Muhammad keeping down the funky bass, Tribe friend Spanky plays guitar and the group shares keyboard and drum machine duties. "We work every day," said Muhammad, who was at least as soft-spoken and conservatively dressed as Q-Tip. "So whether it be a drum machine or a keyboard in front of you that you don't understand, eventually over the years you have to understand it if that's what you're using, so that's what we're doing. We're learning musicians." Looking to approach music from a new perspective, Tribe turned to live instruments, Q-Tip said. Though parts of every album have been live, The Love Movement has a looser, drier feeling more akin to 1991's The Low End Theory than Tribe's last record, the distinctly moodier Beats, Rhymes and Life. It's evident in the spare, insistent beats of "Let's Start It Up," which is much closer to old-school rap than the smoother R&B feel of several tracks on Beats, Rhymes and Life. It's also more in the loose, party vibe of "The Booty," one of the Tribe's most carefree joints to date. Explaining that he wasn't thinking about The Low End Theory while making The Love Movement, Q-Tip said, rather, he was listening to the Notorious B.I.G. and the Beatles' last collective effort, Abbey Road. "The thing I like about [the Beatles] so much, is they put so much into two or three minutes, and yet it still had a lot of sparks to it, it just pierced you," he said. "We didn't do a lot of things consciously on this record, but if there was anything that we did consciously, it was, like, let's just say what we've got to say, let's not make it so dramatic, and keep it simple."

For now, The Love Movement has no big-name guest appearances to call attention to it either, at least not yet. And no, Puff Daddy, the omnipresent rapper/producer, didn't have a hand in it. Rather, it's aggressively, intelligently fun, something you'd expect from an album with a song titled "Rock Rock Y'All," something that flows easily from a stable, focused group of musicians. Beats, Rhymes and Life was darker and more complex, Q-Tip said, because each group member, who are all originally from Queens, N.Y., experienced major changes in their personal lives while they made the record. "I think the last time what it was, we had gone through a lot. [Muhammad] had just got married. I had just become Muslim. I was in a very bugged-out relationship. Phife moved to Atlanta ...There were a lot of things goin' on. Amidst all of that, I feel we managed to put out what was a pretty OK record." Just as the band that formed in Queens in 1989 survived personal upheaval while making Beats, Rhymes and Life, they've remained a top-selling and vital act through vast changes in the rap landscape during the '90s, including increased emphasis on sampling and the ascent of gangsta-rap. "The way I see it, we always remain constant with being who we are," Muhammad said. "Even though time changes, you grow, you learn different things and music changes every day, we still made that change, but we still always stayed ourselves. We're still here doing our thing, and I think we will remain." And while he and his partner say they keep open minds, Q-Tip casts a more critical eye on the rest of the music world. "I think the state right now of hip-hop, as in music, is just very stagnant to me," he says. "A lot of the stuff that's out, I don't like it, because it's not a challenge to the musicality. It's not a challenge to the artistic side of it. It's kind-of bland, and I think people like us who feed off of good stuff ... we need something." Music is due for a shake-up, said Q-Tip, adding that maybe it will happen when the rock and rap worlds share more of each other's culture. Rap is now so popular, so mainstream, he said, that "we're the new rock. We're the new [Led] Zeppelins. We're the new Black Sabbaths. Not to take anything away from the No Doubts of the world, and not to take anything away from the Pearl Jams or the Radioheads of the world, because that still exits. But we're both sharing that arena of pop cult and pop voice, so it would be foolish for us not to mesh the two." And when and if those two musical worlds collide, he added, A Tribe Called Quest would be happy to be at the forefront of this merging of cultures and styles. It's all about sharing ideas and feelings out of a love of music, Q-Tip said. "If A Tribe Called Quest could do a record with somebody like a Nine Inch Nails, and they do something with a Babyface, or he does something with MC Lyte, it calls for something that could be interesting to hear musically, and also, deeper than that, it calls for a hopeful marriage of different ideas." But Tribe is ready for society to move on in more than a musical sense, Muhammad said. Calling the feud between East and West Coast rappers "dead" and "overhyped," he noted that the group has already confronted the conflict on "Keeping It Moving," from Beats, Rhymes and Life. "We dealt with it ... You can't look back at yesterday. That was knee-high socks," he said. [Thurs., Jan. 29, 1998, 9 a.m. PST]