‘This is like the Matrix, man,” says Ishmael Butler as a camera flash lights up Shabazz Palaces’ pitch black studio. Located in a former brewery on the outskirts of Seattle, the space is like a hip-hop Batcave – but instead of gadgets and grappling guns, it’s littered with samplers and vintage synthesizers.
From this lair, Butler and Tendai Maraire have beamed out their own singular vision of rap to the world. Avant garde, cerebral and at times utterly baffling, the pair’s music has been coupled with their own sci-fi tinged mythology, which makes it feel like it’s coming from another astral plane. “People are often like, ‘Oh, these guys are operating in their own universe’,” says Butler. The duo first emerged in 2009, with two EPs that provided little background information about them. Press releases pictured Butler holding a pair of pythons on a lead outside a cornershop, and revelled in such esoteric messages as: “If Bedouins herded beats instead of goats and settled in Seattle instead of the Atlas Mountains, this would be their album.” Intrigued critics called their music “high-resolution disorientation” and “sonic fog”that owed as much to noise and industrial music as it did any recognisable form of hip-hop.
They signed to Sub Pop, releasing Black Up in 2011 and Lese Majesty three years later. Both records married their uncompromising vision of hip-hop with the DIY mentality of alternative rock. “We’ve got those sensibilities,” says Butler. “We listen to that music and we might not use the same elements – guitar, drums, etc – but we get the concepts.” In 2013, Butler became part of Sub Pop’s A&R team, bringing futuristic R&B group THEESatisfaction and rapper Porter Ray to the label.
Shabazz Palaces’ latest communique is a pair of albums – Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs the Jealous Machines – that riff on everything from tech’s impact on modern life to contemporary rap’s foibles and the secret life of supermassive black holes. It’s their best-received work yet with reviewers suggesting that their music is becoming more accessible. “Maybe they’re just catching up,” says Maraire. “Six records in, now they’re starting to get it.”
“When I was a kid,” says Butler, explaining the idea behind Quazarz vs the Jealous Machines, “there was this notion that the machines would take over and they would be these humanoid-looking things that would have enough intelligence to subjugate humans. That was the fear. Then one day I realised that if an electricity grid went out in a city, it’s a wrap. Motherfuckers wouldn’t know what to do. The machines have taken over. They’ve inserted themselves on everybody’s person.”
As paranoid as their concept album may sound, Butler and Maraire are both happily in tune with modern life – they just question its excesses. Elsewhere on the album, Butler rails against contemporary rap stars with their “jaws clenched in a Xanax glow” who are “chauvinist with feminine vanities”. Is he taking aim at anyone specific?
“First of all, I’m not high and mighty. I’m participating in probably the very same things I’m talking about. We don’t feel like we’re different from them: we’ve just got a different style.”
For Butler, Shabazz Palaces is a second act. He’s still best known for his time in 1990s hip-hop group Digable Planets, where he took the alias Butterfly, alongside Mary Ann “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira and Craig “Doodlebug” Irving. They created two era-defining records: Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) won the group a Grammy for best rap performance in 1993, while follow-up Blowout Comb was a commercial failure but achieved cult status with its darker, more militant approach.
The group – whose monikers came from the respect they had for insects – specialised in what would become known as conscious rap and blended jazz samples with lyrics about community organisation and activism. But after internal squabbles and family bereavements, they broke up and Butler moved back to Seattle, declaring the group dead.
In 1999, he recorded a solo album that was ultimately shelved, and briefly worked on futuristic R&B project Cherrywine before living what he called a “hermit’s life” releasing no music at all. “I had a studio in the house, but I wasn’t thinking about putting music out. I just felt that rap was for young people and I was out of the age range.”
Then Butler met Maraire, whose father is the Zimbabwean mbira player Abraham Dumisani Maraire, at a reggae night in Seattle. Maraire, who made a name for himself by combining mbira with Auto-Tune, was a fan of Butler’s and convinced him they should work together.Beyond the technophobia, there are warnings in Shabazz Palaces’ new works about the subtle (and not so subtle) messages Donald Trump is delivering to any Americans who don’t fit into the president’s narrow world view. Butler says he feels “like an alien inside the place you’ve been all your life, because people have all these subtle ways of saying you should either leave or fall in line”. He nods to the fact that successful black Americans still tend to be sport or music celebrities. “Some people can be cool with that, but think they should stay out of business and politics. Then, when they see that other people don’t really accept that any more, they need to whip them into shape.” So for all the futuristic, interplanetary obsessions, is Shabazz Palaces’ music actually rooted right here on planet Earth? Not so fast. “Why wouldn’t you create a world where instead of someone sitting down and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I get that’, they say: ‘Is this real? What are they saying?’ Because when people do that, you know they’re engaged.”
Comments (…)
Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion