Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
Sub Pop: 2011
I’m gonna start off by saying some shit you normally have to wait til the end of a review to hear: Black Up is the album of the year. Hands the fuck down. If you didn’t even read anything else I’ve written here, if you just closed this tab and got yourself a copy, I wouldn’t even be mad at you. My job here would be done. I’d be standing on the aircraft carrier underneath the “Mission Accomplished” banner.
Now normally this is the part where I launch into some hulking, scholarly assessment of the Lasting Value and Importance of this record and its place in the Continuum of Modern Music, but honestly, I did three of those this week, and at the time of writing this, I firmly believe that no amount (or should I say volume) of literary splooge that I could let fly over my laptop’s keyboard right now would accurately pin down the joy of just sitting down playing this album from start to finish. So why even try? My normal routine of writing 4-8 fat paragraphs of bespectacled bullshit can kick rocks with no socks today. We’re gonna try something different. In keeping with the (some would say) impressionistic (but I would say restless) spirit of this batch of songs, instead of a proper review, you’re gonna get a string of loose observations and foggy notions about what makes Black Up awesome:
First off, these Shabazz Palaces dudes have really cool names. Palaceer Lazaro (Do I have to go into detail about who that is? Nah, Google it. Why I gotta do all the work?) is on the mic. Knife Knights.plcrs is on the instrumentals. They would make sick Final Fantasy characters. The album’s got vocal assists by Cat Satisfaction of THEESatisfaction. Fuckin “Cat Satisfaction”! Imma let her rock cause she’s a good singer, but I had the ill Fancy Feast joke lined up.
The song titles are really creative (read: long). Like one’s called “Endeavors for Never (The last time we spoke you said you were not here. I saw you though.)” Another is “A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)”. My favorite is: “An echo from the hosts that profess infinitum”. They’re Interesting and all, but honestly, I’m not even calling them out their full names from here on out. I don’t feel like typing all that.
The beats are crazy. No easy outs. No standard issue boom bap, no crutch-like reliance on classic breaks. Just a wealth of tiny interlocking parts assembling to form inventive and meticulously constructed grooves. Take “Recollections…” for instance. A series of rimshots form a simple bossa nova beat that gets clipped, reversed, and whatever else. Or “Swerve…”, which sounds like about ten different slightly off-time drum beats playing at the same time, like a messy drum circle. Knife’s got this thing with taking samples of women singing and flaying them within an inch of their humanity, best exemplified on “Recollections…” and “An echo…”, that adds an eerie flair to his productions.
A lot of the lyrics here are just plain poetry. Streams of imagery. It’s not always clear what Lazaro’s going on about, but it’s always a joy to hear him do it. Like I don’t know what “dynamic electromagnetic style utensils” are, but I want one. That shit sounds pretty cool, right? I also want to learn how to “find the diamonds underneath the subtlest inflections.” I would be devastating at house parties.
The casual way that styles outside of hip-hop drift in and out of the picture on Black Up is another part of the album’s effortless charm. The main template here is studiously abstract but tuneful electro-boom bap, but Black Up’s sound rubs elbows with all sorts of genres. You get sultry jazz on “Endeavors…”. You get light reggae syncopations on the wobbly “Treatease”. “The King’s New Clothes…” is a hazy and maddeningly short Latin jazz romp. These songs wander all over the musical spectrum without ever coming off forced.
This wouldn’t be a proper Shabazz Palaces anti-think piece without some kind raving about the structure of the songs. It’s the album’s most strikingly avant garde quality. Rap’s long standing penchant for stringent verse-chorus-verse structures meets a grisly death here. Sometimes there isn’t a chorus. Sometimes a bunch of bars leads to a random chant. Sometimes they’re vibing off one particular groove, then suddenly the song turns a corner and pursues a completely different attack. These aren’t so much songs as linear sound journeys. Shabazz lets things play out however they need to. It’s more about the story and the message than delivering things to the listener in neat and familiar packages.
Black Up is unbelievably short. Yesterday I figured out that the album is roughly the exact length of my daily work commute, which is to say it’s over before you get used to the idea of it happening. I know, riveting stuff. There’s a kind of bravery, though, in turning in a 36-minute rap album in 2011 and not lessening the perceived impact of the thing by calling it an EP, like it’s something tossed off. There isn’t a single artist working today who couldn’t benefit from this kind of brevity. It gives the whole affair a latent sense of… urgency. The album ends and I instantly need to put it back on again. And I can do that because no track overstays its welcome here.
Did you buy the damned album yet? You should. Black Up doesn’t change the universe or shift any paradigms or revolutionize rap the way a lot of hyperbolic prose might suggest it does. What it does do is focus on remaining routinely thought provoking, inspiring, and beautiful from start to finish.
5 out of 5
Shabazz Palaces – Swerve… by subpop
