Ishmael Butler may currently be out on the road with Digable Planets, but that isn’t stopping him from releasing It’s a Style Sport, his first full-length album in six years under the Shabazz Palaces moniker. Though the sonic distance between Butler’s project and the ’90s trio where he cut his teeth is vast, one can see traces of Shabazz Palaces on the recent Digable Planets tour where the emcee alternates between rapping and making spacey sounds on his MPC set.
Working with a rotating collection of collaborators, Butler has stretched where rap can go, often reaching for the cosmos. Black Up, Shabazz Palaces’ 2011 debut LP, felt like a revelatory new direction for hip-hop. It’s a Style Sport may not be as initially striking, but it’s a puzzle box of a record, a strange and fascinating deconstruction of not only rap, but also other genres as well, including R&B, jazz, and even new wave.
Even though its lyrics are often buried, much of It’s a Style Sport feels drawn from Butler’s life. Working again with collaborator Erik Blood, Butler creates soundscapes that are brittle and serpentine. Armed with drum machines, abrupt bass stabs, and occasional keys, Butler entombs his voice in this whirlpool of sounds. These songs grew out of jam sessions featuring the musicians who play live with Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets, where Butler provided them with skeletal song structures, and they played until the alchemy locked in.
Listen closely to songs like “Olivia According to Touch” and “Jheri Curl Jump” and it feels like Butler is letting you in on a secret. Opening track “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet)”feels like the portrait of the rapper as a middle-aged man, while “Field Notes” finds Butler dispensing advice to a younger version of himself.
Now 57 years old, Butler is a hip-hop elder. But rather than treading on past glories, Shabazz Palaces allows the Seattle-based emcee a chance to tinker and expand on the genre. Digable Planets leaned heavily into jazz during its brief, two-album run in the ’90s. Butler expands that palette and then some. Just listen to “Show Me the Missouri in Mink.” This feels like futuristic R&B if the genre were dismantled piece by piece and then reassembled by a psych-rock band. Though It’s a Style Sport may not share its pleasures as easily as past Shabazz Palaces efforts, the album will reward those who turn up the volume and open their minds.