Review: Shabazz Palaces – Black Up
Shabazz Palaces – Black Up [Sub Pop] // Grade: B
The beginning of “Are you… Can you… Were you? (Felt)” — the third song on Shabazz Palaces new album Black Up — starts off with a crescendo of looping guitar. It’s all tremolo and delay, sounding wobbly and far away, with a bit of record hiss for some extra mise en scene. A couple of seconds later some clipped strings and an intermittent dusty snare drum hit. It’s the opening of an old soul record, something like The Stylistics or Blue Magic chopped and looped. You know the records, the type with dudes in matching suit, doing choreographed dance moves and singing in falsetto about heartbreak, which ironically, leads to babies getting made.
This is the music rap has been built around since day one. Yet, the sample here never gets to the point where the melody comes in and you get a bit of nostalgia or overt emotion. There’s no cooing or pleading. It stays abstract, formless, teasing you with the possibility that the song will slip into a recognizable refrain, but instead tip toes on the periphery of memory. That is, until about a minute in, when Palaceer Lazaro drops in repeating the phrase “it’s a feeling… it’s a feeling” and it becomes clear that the introduction to this song serves as a statement of purpose for the entire album.
Black Up, is an album that sounds familiar and foreign at the same time, like when you hear those mariachi cats on the subway cover “Hey Ya.” The music has the futuristic cut and paste sampling of early Prefuse 73 mixed with the synth bump, squeals and shuffle of a dude like Flying Lotus. It’s part acoustic instrumentation empathy and part coldness of electronics. A song like “The King’s new clothes were made by his own hands” quietly rumbles along with a repeating loop of synth noise and hand drums before finally transitioning into a chorus that sounds like a Fela Kuti jam. This sound shouldn’t work, but, in execution makes me think of an alternate future where Africans got way into colonialism and took over the whole planet. This would be the song they played when the Afronauts returned triumphantly from subjugating Mars.
The aforementioned “Are you…” goes through four different movements before the four minute song is over. It’s one of the best songs on the album in achieving the ever changing orchestration of beats Shabazz Palaces is going for. At no time does it feel unnecessarily busy, it just moves and grows as the rap does. All the while Laazaro’s rhymes tell totally relatable stories of everyday struggles, but, because of his staccato delivery and occasional overdubbing it sounds like he’s reading from a book of rhymes that were cut up and rearranged. It kind of reminds of the way newer Andre 3000 rhymes always sounds like he’s having a conversation with himself (without ever using Nicki Minaj style drama theatre voice alteration). You get the hint that dude might be a lil’ bonkers from how he talks, but , when you listen to what he’s saying you can feel it.
Shabazz Palaces features Palaceer Lazaro (which is the perfect name for a protagonist of an Afrocentric space opera) who used to be known as Ishmael Butler or “Butterfly” of Digable Planets. As in the Digable Planets that made “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).” Yes, after seventeen years jazzy, happy rap classics can ferment into something that sounds like a sound collage of the ethnic sounding parts from the Johnny Quest soundtrack and the original score to Star Trek. In the good way. Surprisingly, for a dude who’s been in the rap game longer than most new rappers have been alive, Shabazz Palaces comfortably sits among the current crop of weirdo spaced out rappers like Main Attrakionz and SpaceGhostPurrp. At the same time his newer style isn’t such a reinvention that it doesn’t feel tied to the rap of his youth. Black Up turns out to be a solid album for cats looking for something that’s left of field yet still cognizant, a bumpin’ trip though the space between 1993 and infinity.
June 20th, 2011 at 3:42 pm
I agree with most everything you are saying, so it begs the question: why the B? You don’t seem to dislike any of it…
June 20th, 2011 at 3:49 pm
How is a B a bad grade?
June 20th, 2011 at 7:00 pm
It’s not bad, it’s just worse than an A. The grading scale seems to go no lower than D, so especially in a world of +s and -s, B is closer to “ehh” than it is to “aah!” (cue laughs).
So far as I understand it, D sucks, C is bad, B is alright, A is good. Compared to the A- that Action Bronson got for an album that was essentially above-average New York rap, I’d like to know what makes this album inferior.
June 20th, 2011 at 7:09 pm
That’s not an accurate interpretation of our grading scheme. And I admit that have trouble keeping most of my reviewers to following the Bloglin’s grading scheme to the letter and doing so consistently. That said, in short As would be Classic, something that in 5-10 years would be just as good hearing it then as it is today. Bs would be great to good albums. Cs would be anything from mediocre albums supported by a handful of good tracks to fluffy guilty pleasures you know have no staying power. Ds are just forgettable or contrived and an F is either just awful or unlistenable. Though to be fair the few Fs that have ever been given out have mostly been because the release or band simply offended the reviewers sensibilities.
June 21st, 2011 at 9:23 am
Huh, I see… In the absolute Bloglin scheme of things, it makes sense; I wasn’t criticizing the grading scale though, as much as the fact that there’s just no indication in the review that Black Up is anything else than a future classic. Prefuse and Fly Lo for the beats, Outkast and Souls of Mischiefs for the raps, these are big names to live up too – in a debut – on Sub Pop – and it takes some balls to release this kind of album in the current state of rap. Even more so from a guy that was in Digable Planets (regardless of the mild success of the 2 indie EPs released before) this is actually a best of both worlds kind of deal.
Compared to the reviews of Juice and Goblin which were both tampered by comments to the childishness/postmodernity of their authors, I guess Ray found Shabazz Palaces too adult then?
June 21st, 2011 at 9:42 am
You’ll have to ask Ray about that but he has a well documented soft spot for both Soulja Boy and OFWGKTA. He’ll probably chime in here at some point as he usually does. If you want my opinion? I like this album, it just doesn’t really grab me in nor make me say “Holy shit!” in the way it’s setting itself up/people making it out to be.
In short it tries to hard to be different instead of just naturally being so but is still a good listen regardless. And in other words it ain’t no Purrp and if you don’t agree suck a dick for 2011.
June 21st, 2011 at 11:54 am
Don’t get me wrong, I will be the first to admit I am a dirty funky stank smelling ass pissy dookie booty funky breath ass dirty ass ugly motherfucker bitch. I stopped having expectations from music a lot time ago, so I was happy to hear an album that’s actually good getting released for really real and not as an internet mixtape. I think Ray responds to comments a week too late for me, I will have forgotten about his review by then. That is to say, I will have had mvh hxvd bvzt.
June 21st, 2011 at 12:09 pm
So tweet @ him and tell him to step up his comment reply game.
June 21st, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Yeah, I gave Soulja Boy’s last tape a B- and Goblin a B+. I personally find Soulja Boy’s shit to be fun, thought provoking no, but am I humming “Zan With That Lean” still? Yeah. Goblin, is really dense and personal, I keep coming back to that disc as well.
Shabazz Palaces while a very good album I dont know if I’m going to need to come back to it by the end of the year. Honestly I think if I was going to listen to Black Up I’d probably just listen to Bigg Juss’ Black Mamba Serums because it has a similar feel but it’s done a bit better.
I don’t like to write reviews that are a note by note dissection of the piece, they’re not good reads and kinda suck some of the fun of discovery out of the record. I just try to give you an impression of it. Let you decide whether or not you want to d/l it or go buy it. If you want I could list all the small issues I had with the record that kept it from being a classic to me, but, I feel like all those reasons could easily be chalked up to personal tastes. Theres no glaring holes, hence a B. I like Black up it’s a really good record, I don’t know if it’s wildly exceptional though. I want cats to check it out, because I’m sure for some people it might be there jam.
June 21st, 2011 at 2:11 pm
I’m pretty sure personal taste / opinion is what I am looking for in a review… I don’t want to hear a balanced view, I have my own ears and I only read reviews from people whose aesthetic sense I know so I know what they mean when they say “that beat sucks” because they’ve never heard a ternary rhythm. I’m probably weird in that way but I don’t look for reviews after I have listened to something – usually my decision is made at that point.
I hum Zan Wid Dat Lean all the time when walking around town, that stuff is goooood. And obviously I don’t hum any of Black Up, I don’t think it’s even meant to be hummed, these are totally different musical experiences… But conversely, neither Juice nor Goblin are exceptional records if you look any further than the idiosyncrasies. There is nothing novel musically in what they do, they’re just giving their angles to existing trends. Shabazz Palaces to me is going the other directions, an old-school angle to a new trend of rap music being actually acceptable by people who listen to indie rock…
I’ve had the strangest people react to this album in a good way, it’s definitely not as clear-cut as it may look, as opposed to (again) Soulja Boy, Tyler or Action Bronson, whose material you can decide on at first listen.
PS: concerning the comparison with BMS… I kind of see it, but I don’t. It’s weird. It’s like digital vs. analog. Now I have to listen to both albums again.
June 21st, 2011 at 2:52 pm
I hear what you’re saying but disagree. Basically, it comes down to this: if you want to make good music you either do something no one has done before or you do whats done before but better.
That Action Bronson record does shit thats been done before a 1000 times, but his personality & spin makes it better than anything I’ve heard of that genre in quite some time. I’d argue that Goblin, while not reinventing the wheel musically, does go new places lyrically by virtue of the character Tyler portrays.
Soulja Boy makes pop songs. Thats it and thats all. He has a better ear than most for doing such.
Like I said I dig the SP record, but I dont see where it’s so wild that it would warrant an A. He’s doing stuff that’s been done but I dont hear the spin that makes it different or the execution to make it stand out. Comparing it to influencers/contemporaries it doesnt hit as hard as the best records from those cats. whereas, I can compare songs from Goblin to beats from the Neptunes and they stand side by side.
Im not comparing SP to Soulja Boy, Action Bronson or Tyler with this B. im comparing Black Up to One Word Extinguisher, Black Mamba Serums, Cosmogramma and Arrythmia.
SP’s next album could be a classic, this one is just very good.
June 21st, 2011 at 5:13 pm
It’s funny because One Word Extinguisher, Cosmogramma and Arrythmia are all sophomore (not to say sophomoric) albums. And so is BMS if you are talking about the version released stateside.
I think we actually agree though; except on the fact that I think SP’s next album, if there is one, won’t be as good. And on grading, of course, but that would be because we have different criteria… I certainly wouldn’t expect 40-year-old Ish to have the personality of kids in their twenties.
When I hear Goblin’s beats, I just wonder what Global Phlowtations’ records would have sounded like if they had had Garage Band to play with. Or, you know. Ruff Ryder-era Swizz Beats.
June 22nd, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Ray, I really enjoyed this, great review. Thanks.