#60: Shabazz Palaces — Lese Majesty (2014)

Seattle, WA — Sub Pop

For our sixtieth review we are meeting up with an old friend once again: Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, from all-time classic classic Philly trio Digable Planets, which I’ve covered in the past, now going by Palaceer Lazaro, who in 2009 joined forces with Zimbabwean-American multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire and kickstarted his still-going project Shabazz Palaces, with quite a few records released so far. It’s also the first of a dozen or so albums on my list that were suggested by my good buddy and talented musician Rafael, who’s a guy with interesting music tastes, so I was pretty curious when I got into this. I’m more than familiar with Ish’s 90s output, but had never really jammed his post-DG music, so of course I went ahead and jammed not only Lese Majesty but also the majority of his stuff under Shabazz Palaces.

It’s an impressive discography. Not gonna go in detail about it, but there’s an interesting sense of progression: the first EPs are sort of their “figuring it out” era; the following two albums, of which Majesty is the second, consist of tight, minimal concept pieces and spoken word sonnets; finally, from 2017 onwards, they become more eclectic, mixing their trademark stuff with old-school references and current pop tendencies.

Butler grew up surrounded by political awareness and high culture, which has always been present in his body of work, and Majesty is no exception. His raps are highbrow, high concept, surrealistic in style and futuristic in execution, with apparent disregard to some of hip-hop’s core tenets simultaneous to displays of absolute mastery over some others. It’s kind of an obvious comparison, but this really does remind me of one of my absolute favorite albums and reviews, Divine Styler’s Spiral Walls Containing Autumns of Light, in more ways than one. I must say that Ishmael always looked to me like kind of a weirdo — not the uncanny, unnerving, stares at the cashier in the grocery store for way longer than he should type of weirdo, mind you; more like that quiet but charismatic guy with some off-kilter tastes and a Sun Ra, Rammellzee, Gil Scott-Heron obsession, you know? And Palaces as a whole is pretty much the perfect space for him to put his particular flavor of weird to practice as freely as possible.

Butler’s rhyming capabilities have been well documented by now. I feel like the best word to describe his style is “intriguing”: he’s not incredibly technical, even though he knows how to use technique well when he needs to, and he doesn’t really get knee-deep in wordplay segues as well. He’s more about the general thing of a verse instead of punctual highlights, and will not hesitate to go into a repetitive or technically unimpressive section if that helps with the general narrative or vibe of that song. He does indulge in word juggling quite frequently, but even the way he does that is different; one of my favorite examples is in Noetic Noiromantics, the album’s official love song: “I never thought that I would find else somebody/ Who never thought that there was fine someone as me/ I thought that maybe I felt all there is to be/ Yet there’s a notion growing throughout me newly and it’s that we…”. Notice how the sentences are kind of weird and wrong? He changes the order of the words to achieve steady rhyming in the hook, something not common at all and that is easily missed, but does work toward building variation and novelty.

One thing that’s undeniable is how serious and committed to their thing they are. No matter the theme, from wacky Afrofuturistic tripping to reminiscing over the old school of rap to dissing soulless industry goons, it always comes through in a way that commands respect from the listener, and it’s not a record that sounds forced or gimmicky. They own their discourse to the max, never allowing it to become a parody of itself — mind you, I’m not saying it’s always convincing, but they are always trying. At the same time, they’re not afraid to swerve into pop territory from time to time, going from spoken word over atonal ambient sounds to triplet flows over double time hi-hats and back again like it’s nothing. That’s something that I really do feel is what gives Majesty its special sheen, and I cannot understate how important it is to me that they keep in touch with the general pop sensibilities, both recognizing its relevance as part of their musical heritage, and using it to their advantage, both in subversive and conservative ways.

Much like the recently-reviewed To Pimp a Butterfly, this is a concept record down to the very last glitchy snare hit, and everything serves a higher purpose. Majesty’s eighteen remarkably short songs (average runtime: two and a half minutes) are distributed in eight thematically distinct sub-sections, or suites, as they call them (you can identify which are which on the album’s Wikipedia page), and there really is a noticeable movement from start to end: the suites actually make sense as little chapters that sometimes almost feel like one long meandering track instead of multiple separate ones. Their themes go from self-knowledge, heritage and love to hedonism, paranoia and violence, and most if not all suites are fairly distinctive but also fit within the general tone at the same time. The thing as a whole doesn’t follow a straight linear story, but rather alludes to a series of ideas and concepts that gain their sense and purpose in conjunction and contrast with each other. His writing is dense, with a lot of interesting references and cyclical ideas, which gives Lese Majesty an intelligent, if sometimes kinda boorish, feel; an effect which is also further improved by the sonic consistency of the album as a whole, made possible by the top-tier production.

I don’t know who did what when it came to production, but you can tell that they were locked in, as the kids say these days. Aesthetic coherence is at an all-time high, with all beats sounding similar from a broader perspective, but still retaining their particular characteristics and quirks for the most part. Most of the sounds in here consist of simple synth chords and pads, dub and IDM-inspired drum patterns and processing, and bleep-bloops that come and go, with a variety of other things showing up every once in a while, and a few suddenly weird, almost disturbing beats here and there. And I might be tripping a little, but I strongly feel like there’s a direct line between how clean, minimal, almost dry, both Lese Majesty and Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) sound. The sounds dance with each other but never really meld, never retract into one indistinct mass, which makes for some nice ear candy from time to time. Finally, the many kinds of voice processing present here go pretty well with Butler’s strangely jovial, clear, almost strident voice.

Saying Lese Majesty is a difficult listen wouldn’t be true, but saying it’s an easy one would be false as well. It’s not something you go into with the same mindset as a regular rap album, and it does demand reflection and pondering, lest it turn into an unbroken haze that doesn’t really communicate much. It operates based on two main things: recursive narration and tiny details, both of which are almost imperceptible to a casual listener. It demands your attention and concentration, but will handsomely reward you for doing so. I’ll wrap this up with NME’s words on Lese Majesty, which I fully endorse and agree with:

Leftfield hip-hop can be a smug thing, either rather too pleased with its forays into abstraction, or pious in its refusal of genre norms. Shabazz Palaces’ real skill, though, is in taking weird-as-fuck sounds and themes and twisting them into something not just palatable, but catchy. Lese Majesty is not a difficult record. It’s just one with the confidence to reject tired old models and build its own future logic, and the result is mysterious, spiritual, and funky as shit.

Favorite ̶t̶r̶a̶c̶k̶s̶ suites

Suite 1: The Phasing Shift: The intro to the album, it starts out with this triumphant synth piece and gradually shifts into some impressive rhyme stuff and weirder beats toward track three. Feels kind of like a preview of what’s to come in the rest of the album. “Farceur, quite simply it is him/ It’s black-ephilic petalistic palistrophic hymns/ Darkness, the light that flashed to dare/ Kingdom stellar lairs to which my kind is the heirs”

Suite 4: Palace War Council Meeting: Kind of a more paranoid, almost violent section, with wacky spoken word interludes, dissonant, percussive, Clipping-esque beats, and some great rhyming. My probably part is probably its third track, …Down 155th In The MCM Snorkel, which is about Palaceer Lazaro’s sketchy beginnings in hip-hop: “We was escaping the bleak, pursuing a feeling/ Pressure pushed them towards the instinct of brilliance/ Capture then scraping the breaks off to build songs/ They was in the park up between the buildings/ And they dancing face like “ah-hah” and “mm-hmm”/ Voice would echo, calling — slap off the buildings/ Anticipating ceremony to begin/ Food provided by the neighborhood dealers”

Suite 7: High Climb To The Gallows: maybe the album’s biggest sonic and poetic apex, it starts out with some weird, no-wave-esque beats and simpler, more “personal” bars in Mindglitch Keytar TM Theme, which then develop into Motion Sickness’ gorgeous beat and unbelievable poetic acrobatics: “Crime related, activated, trap located, strap to spray it/ If you face the case, you faded, player you’da never made it/ And although the state delayed it and you been equated/ Sent you back up on the pavement, this one here is dedicated […] It ain’t hard to tell boy, you all aglow, everybody knowin’ now you in the show/ Retainers paid out, trying to map the play out/ The streets is undefeated, really, now there ain’t no way out”