Shabazz Palaces
Robed in Rareness
SUB POP
Forever Afrofuturistic and funky about it, producer, rapper, and conceptualist Ishmael Butler’s Shabazz Palaces is the answer to the eternal question, “What would happen if Octavia Butler and Sun Ra had a child and gave it a set of synthesizers and sequencers to play with?” Iconoclastic and cerebral to the point of creepy abstraction, the “Black slang acrobat” (a designation that comes from 2020’s terror-scopic “Chocolate Souffle”) goes smartly about the process of making experimental, eccentric hip-hop like no other artist before or after him. Always has.
What happens to be different about Robed in Rareness—as opposed to his usual steely exercises in whifty eclectronica honed over five prior records—is that Butler has found company to share his vision with after parting with multi-instrumentalist Baba Maraire in 2020. No longer an island unto himself, Butler welcomes his family (son Lil Tracy, who’s worked on previous SP tracks in the past), heartbreaking fellow Seattle rapper Porter Ray, and emcees Lavarr the Starr, Royce the Choice, Q Fitness, and Geechi Suede into the Afrofuturist fold. With these additions, Butler’s quest—and his fit for freaky sound—no longer scans as solitary but as something more communal: George Clinton’s mothership-bound P-Funk for a new generation.
While “Cinnamon Bun” comes across as one more dynamic track in Shabazz Palace’s food-based history, and the lone solo track “Hustle Crossers” is a boogie wonderland, one uniquely crepuscular and salty cut is the Tracy collab “Woke Up in a Dream,” a father-son pairing in free flight for Saturn-esque soul.
