Shabazz Palaces
It’s a Style Sport
SUB POP
Few artists have careers like Ishmael Butler. The hip-hop mainstay is currently wrapping up a tour with Digable Planets to celebrate the belated 30th anniversary of Blowout Comb. Now, being in a position to tour internationally in celebration of a decades-old album already implies a seismic impact. Butler, however, moves different. The jazz-rap giant took a brief funk detour with his group Cherrywine in the early 2000s before launching Shabazz Palaces with multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire. Since Maraire’s departure from the group in the late 2010s, Butler has been balancing Digable Planets’ legacy tours while pushing hip-hop into its next chapter with his solo releases. His latest, the contemplative It’s a Style Sport, feels like the first nightcap of an illustrious career.
A temporal fusion of hip-hop’s past, present, and future, the new LP warps the clock to reflect and expound upon the career of a giant. “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet)” kicks the project off with triumphal wisdom as Butler orates the tale of his life over a bounding bass line, highlighting the rules he’s followed to get here. As the chants of “Ahh World” fade, however, a creeping whirl of bass, hi-hats, and the occasional snare slap shifts the vibe. Butler then spits the story of a young street hustler on “Field Notes,” flipping the coin where he etched the come-up story proffered in the opener. Ever the showman, he flips it again on “Show Me Missouri in Mink” as he reflects on his young adult life over a snapping R&B groove. The breadth of delivery shown across the three tracks is peerless, jumping from soot-stained spoken-word poetry to slithering narration to a crooning sing-song seamlessly.
The rest of the album sees Butler bounce between playful love joints and some good ol’ fashioned braggadocio reminiscent of the early rap game. “Jheri Curl Jump” gets the blood flowing with some glitched-out production, while “Tongue in Chic” leans into disco-synth flavors as Butler lists the ideal traits of a dream girlfriend. “Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M.” sees Butler dropping a series of one-liners over a warped synth beat as the track leans fully into the Afrofuturist stylings that have been central to Butler’s career, with intergalactic beeps fluttering amid the stardust synthplay.
Before It’s a Style Sport plays out, Butler makes sure to scramble the clock one last time. The cymbal crash from drummer Kassa Overall cleanses the air to usher in closing track “From One Future to Another.” Here, Butler flies over the drums with a poem on futurity, dreams, and memory as a bubbling keyboard flutters through and a wall of electric guitars builds. The crescendo is hinted at but never fully arrives—instead, a prismatic array of sounds soar over Butler’s repeated refrain that he “wrote you on a rainy day.” It’s a grand finale only a group of musicians who have years of chemistry could produce, and it’s no wonder Butler gathered a close group of Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets touring musicians to bring it to life.
When asked in a press release what It’s a Style Sport is doing, Butler simply answered that the album is “taking it back to what rap is really all about… This kind of tough, friendly competition to see who could out-style the next person.” The reverence for hip-hop that the Seattle-based emcee possesses is palpable, and nowhere is that more apparent than on It’s a Style Sport. Realness and style can’t be bought; they’re cultivated, and few have the time, care, or skill to out-style Ishmael Butler.
