Shabazz Palaces
Lese Majesty
Sub Pop

www.subpop.com
 

Shabazz Palaces is an experimental Seattle-based hip-hop duo comprised of Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire, son of Mbira master Dumisani Maraire. Their sophomore album Lese Majesty was released a month ago on Sub Pop Records.

Although Lese Majesty nearly doubles the amount of tracks featured than debut album Black Up, we only see about ten minutes of additional audio. I think this serves as a testament to the advanced experimentalism being purveyed by Shabazz Palaces in this sophomore album, adopting a classic punk music approach to the album – lots of short tracks. Though Shabazz Palaces aren’t the first to tackle an album this way, Madlib and DOOM’s Madvillainy is a testament to the approach’s overall effectiveness in hip-hop.

Ishmael Butler gained prominence as being one-third of legendary ’90s hip-hop/jazz group Digable Planets, he was known as Butterfly then. Over twenty years since his debut, his avant garde approach to his music has grown by strides. On Lese Majesty we encounter a significantly less acoustic approach than their last effort, with ambient buzzing, blips and cloudy vocals taking the forefront. This snow globe of sound is encapsulated by a heavy, yet emblematic booming bass, lovers of mainstream hip-hop could easily be lured by the catchy boom of tracks like “#CAKE.” The resulting album is a multifaceted and dynamic work. It sounds equally at home played quietly on earbuds or at trunk-slapping volumes in a subwoofer-equipt Jeep.

Butler’s lyrics are impressionistic in their complexity, I’d argue that I was put into a state of forced introspection as there is simply no way to connect the dots and decipher the meaning behind these lyrics in real-time. Grasping for these crumbs of meaning gives each track a tinge of self-reverberance, enhanced by my own projection of substance here. This is further compounded by the final mastering of the album that situates the vocals far behind the rest of the audio, leaving lyrics clouded and sometimes undecipherable. I get a sense that there is a concrete narrative or inherent/intended meaning behind most of these tracks, though dissecting it from these hypnotic backdrops is a near-impossibility. Lyrical complexity and ambiguity is nothing new, underground legends Ghostface Killah and DOOM are both champions of such techniques, but hardly to this extreme. I can only name a handful of emcees who’ve attempted this degree of artistry in hip-hop, including Elucid (of Billy Woods), Ka and MC Ride (of Death Grips).

I can’t really recommend this to folk just getting acquainted to hip-hop, it strays so far from standard hip-hop conventions that the “is this hip-hop at all?” question is definitely applicable – the title itself suggests Lèse-majesté, meaning “treason.” Starting here would be like suggesting a bluegrass novice begin with David Grisman, it’s just not fit for untrained ears. However, for a very interesting listen and to witness to how far the limits of conventional and traditional hip-hop can be pushed – give it a spin.

— Matthew Hengeveld