Hiphop, as Baraka said of Harlem, is vicious modernism. Hiphop is about hero worship too, except the hero isn't really a man, but The Race itself, and all that bloody drama. One lovely thing about hiphop is the way it keeps marketing and mythologizing the extraordinary otherness of the African American working class. The same folk once described by A.B. Spellman as ''the most despised group of people on the face of the earth''--and perhaps more concerned than most that its mythic stages and heroic models be upheld.

There aren't supposed to be any second acts in hiphop, no coming back for rhyme's fallen angels. Yet looming before us is the second coming and resurrection of the god Rakim Allah. Five years after self-retirement, RA, as always promised, has returned with The 18th Letter (the more expensive version of which also includes The Book of Life, a reprise CD of greatest hits). Rakim has haunted hiphop in those five years, becoming by design or accident a more formidable presence in his absence than if he'd stuck it out during the gangsta derailment. Alone among rhyme artists, he's iconic in the way Miles and Trane were: a symbol of the aesthetic ideal who represents his craft like a king, if not a god. First of all, I'm a soloist. A soul controller. RA practically invented what dream hampton calls lyric-lovers hiphop, where the writing commands more attention than the arrangements and the yo-yo nigga attitude. His allure remains secure despite mediocre producers past, present, and probably future. In this most unforgiving of neophiliac genres, where the mere hint of yesterday is enough to set one's career wrecking ball a-swinging, Rakim is the only untouchable. There's one R in the alphabet. It's a one-letter word, and it's about to get more complex.

Chalk it up to his pure-artist stance and indestructible male mystique, one seductive and intimidating to other type-A males (think Michael Jordan) and marked by what Ntozake Shange identified as the ''relaxed virility'' of our champions. Rakim is cool in the classical mode, a way of being defined not by hip detachment but artfulness, self-sufficiency, and critical introspection. George Benson says Miles Davis made being a jazz musician seem the noblest profession. Rakim does that for rhyming. In those dark nights of the soul, when every lyricist has to ask if they're in an art form or a coonshow, he provides sanity and a guiding light. You're a step away from frozen, stiff as if you're posin'. Dig into my brain as the rhyme gets chosen.

Hiphop expects a lot out of Rakim's comeback--re-enchantment, reminders of the art form's noncommercial values, and that aura of integrity he wields like a shield. Hiphop prays RA, from his Olympian perch, can steer it between Scylla and Charybdis: the self-infatuated millennialism of the Wu and the gross materialism of Bad Boy Entertainment. (Nowadays hiphop doesn't just endorse Sprite, hiphop is Sprite and likewise rationalizes Life McLite.) We pray, O RA, you deliver us from the evils of commodification. We are some dreaming motherfuckers, aren't we?

Rakim stokes our heroic fantasies of a market-free hiphop because he made his bones the old-fashioned, pre-MTV way, when skillz and street sales gripped Eric B. and Rakim a reputed million-dollar one-off deal with Island at a time when major labels didn't want the word hiphop whispered in their presence. We revere RA because he's the last hiphop legend we created on our own and because his mystique resists all forms of molestation, from weak tracks to wack videos. (Recall the clip for ''Don't Sweat the Technique,'' where wonderbread models in polka-dot bikinis frolicked about the parapet of a whiter castle?)

On The Book of Life's CD of Rakim classics, he provokes awe still, and nostalgia. ''Follow the Leader'' and ''I Know I Got Soul'' are the most inventive and incantatory poems hiphop has produced. What RA brought to hiphop was a rich and powerful inner life, a monastic intensity capable of subduing the noise factor with contemplation. I start to think and then I sink into the paper like I was ink. His was a thought process akin to Charlie Parker and Rilke's, as pretentious as that sounds. (Until there's Oxford degrees in hiphop literature you're stuck with me.) Like those giants of transcendental production, Rakim doesn't so much develop his themes as peel them open, bringing out the pearls hidden inside. Whoever's out of hand I'm gonna give 'em handles. Light 'em up and blow 'em out like candles. Or should I just let 'em melt? Give them a hand so they can see how it felt. Only De La Soul and Q-Tip can match Rakim when it comes to making the abstract emotionally resonant. And his vocal tone, an alchemical mix of the smooth and the gruff, defines modern hiphop vocal style.

Two or three things we know about Rakim are that he was a prizewinning saxophone student who appreciated Thelonious Monk's use of Asian music and that he was raised in Wyandach, Long Island (pronounced wine dance as hiphop irony would have it), a town I recently heard described as a place ''where everybody looked like they had come straight from Alabama without ever passing through New York City.'' (There's a documentary to be made about the segregated Black communities of the Island and their gifts to the music of Eric B. and Rakim, Public Enemy, EPMD, De La Soul, and Busta Rhymes.) Rakim was the first prominent lyricist to bring the Five Percent Nation's teachings to hiphop. ''Mathematics'' are now all over the Internet thanks to you Wu-Tang fanatics, but in 1986 Five Percent philosophy was as arcane to pop culture as Rastafari was in 1976 and just as crucial for bringing African spirituality into the mix. (RZA should have chipped away at the debt he owes by sliding Rakim dope beats for peanuts, sparing us the new album's Wu clones, Biggie reduxes, and miscalculated '80s revivals.) RA was never heavy-handed about it--just let you know he had more on his mind than MC battling. Never as thematically omnivorous as Tip or Chuck D, hiphop's Zen archer took aim at his inner sanctum rather than the base or the superstructure. His cosmos was his own microcosm. As the earth gets further and further away, planets are small as balls of clay. Astray into the Milky Way, see a star. Better follow it cause it's the R. As Chuck D noted, ''I Know You Got Soul'' registers profoundly because Rakim articulates what soul means, not just what it feels like to possess one. This is hiphop as gnosis.

If only this self-acknowledging god had returned to us with musical fanfare worthy of his re-entry. Imaginative musical arrangements and inspiring accompaniment are as essential for rappers as for jazz vocalists. Rakim's classic tracks were anything but generic--their taut but nervous syncopation and synthesized spaciness recall classic dub, Detroit techno, and even triphop. (Coldcut's remix of ''Paid in Full'' and M/A/R/R/S's Rakim-sampling ''Pump Up the Volume'' now seem the mixological template for bhangra, jungle, and Tricky.) Those elements, combined with a boomy tribal emphasis on the 808 kick drum, provoked our former saxophone prodigy to decorate the beat with a flow that was serpentine and full of micro-rhythmic nuance. (Lester Young comes to mind, as does Wayne Shorter.) The new tracks from Premier and Pete Rock are neither that distinctive nor inspiring; they'd be fine for a Whodini comeback album but not RA's. More striking and ingenious is the cover design coupling Rakim's remarkable lyrics with some dope paintings in the African modernist vein. Props to designer/curator Danny Simmons (Russell and Reverend Run's older brother) for those choices. Juxtaposing such visuals with Rakim's work begs a rhetorical question: why--besides the mercantile instinct--can't avant-garde dance-band leaders like Henry Threadgill or Olu Dara orchestrate some numbers on his next outing? A vision like RA's deserves a more elevated perspective than hiphop's corporate ladder seems capable of providing.