Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler’s days as part of Grammy-winning golden age hip-hop group Digable Planets are almost out of sight. Few in music – let alone in rap – are granted a shot at a second coming, so when the trio first parted ways in 1995 and Butler moved back to Seattle, he could have been forgiven for thinking that was that. However, on meeting multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire (son of mbira maestro Dumisani Maraire, and not part of this new record), the two embarked on a collaboration that would reinvigorate Butler’s desire to release music and rejuvenate interest in fringe hip-hop styles. As Shabazz Palaces, the pair have invested more than a decade into their singular vision for rap; one that travels in both directions along any axis.
Following a couple of EPs, their 2011 debut album Black Up proved their breakthrough. The first hip-hop release on famed Seattle indie label Sub Pop, it combined Butler’s slick and dextrous lyrical abstractions with Maraire’s lean, cosmic beats and would become celebrated as one of the most memorable records of the 2010s. The duo doubled down on their astral antics on grandiose successor Lese Majesty, followed by two psychedelic sci-fi concept albums in 2017. Some remixes, collaborations and A&Ring for Sub Pop aside, Butler has spent recent years observing the rise of his son, artist Lil Tracy, best known for collaborations with the late emo-rap revivalist Lil Peep. “I just felt that rap was for young people and I was out of the age range,” Butler once said of his hiatus from music in the 2000s. Now in his early 50s, he reinvents himself once more with the release of Shabazz Palaces’ fifth LP, The Don of Diamond Dreams – an album that incorporates elements of more contemporary, youthful rap but is perhaps ultimately not a rap record at all.
Just as the album is bisected in its sequencing – each half heralded by an eerie, ominous interplanetary vocoder transmission – the listening experience is also divided between concretes and abstracts, familiar territories and intangible unknowns. “Well I never was the type to live a sedentary life / I always had to get up / it was the promise of new pastures,” Butler declares on Ad Ventures, speaking to his own motivations as well as that of fellow Afrofuturists from the Seattle-based Black Constellation collective. Electronic pads dither around a pertinent snare roll to fake a mirage of momentum as the track somehow seems to move forward at a standstill. This disconcerting feeling becomes a recurrent theme on the album as Butler strives to lose himself within the groove, a furrow sometimes so deep it can languish there.
There’s a concerted effort to channel the alchemical funk of George Clinton, as opposed to the focus on interpreting Sun Ra’s free-form space jazz from previous releases. The beats are dense and viscous: Fast Learner throws some weight to its dry, reverb-heavy drum kit as twinkling keys and floundering croons from guest vocalist Purple Tape Nate tempt delirium. Bad Bitch Walking drenches its percussive shuffle in breaths and whispers. There are as many electric bass solos in the album as there are for sax, and too much of the second half is caught in a funk, with thick smog, rattlesnake drums and hallucinatory audio-panning often obscuring the vocals.
Butler’s burst-fire flow and self-referential wordplay on Wet nods to the type of verse you might expect from Lil Uzi Vert – a far cry from Shabazz Palaces’ sound but a signal that Butler keeps his minds open as well as his ears. Despite the stumbles, it’s this willingness to switch things up and the ambition of scale in The Don of Diamond Dreams that prove Shabazz Palaces to be such a fascinating and exciting project in the age of algorithms and formulae. Uninterested in providing obvious satisfaction, Butler is willing to preserve a rare degree of mystery: there’s almost a chasm of difference between listening to the record on speakers and earphones. His verbal clarity only reveals itself via the latter experience. It’s as if his words evaporate on contact with air, enhancing the music’s elusive form.
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion