Digable Planets will forever be cool — a point they proved by performing their classic, “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)” this morning on Tamron Hall.
Introduced by a “fanning-out” Tamron Hall, Digable Planets delivered a grooving rendition of “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” dancing around the stage and laying down their verses with graceful ease. Watch the performance below.
Get Digable Planets Tickets Here
The group also sat down for a conversation with Hall, reflecting on the journey they’ve been on and the legacy of their innovative, jazzy style. “It was hard to get a record deal… so [we] didn’t really think in terms of fame and success, [we] were just trying to go incrementally to the next step,” Ishmael Butler said. Hear the full conversation below.
The appearance comes in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Digable Planets’ debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space...
Introduced by a “fanning-out” Tamron Hall, Digable Planets delivered a grooving rendition of “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” dancing around the stage and laying down their verses with graceful ease. Watch the performance below.
Get Digable Planets Tickets Here
The group also sat down for a conversation with Hall, reflecting on the journey they’ve been on and the legacy of their innovative, jazzy style. “It was hard to get a record deal… so [we] didn’t really think in terms of fame and success, [we] were just trying to go incrementally to the next step,” Ishmael Butler said. Hear the full conversation below.
The appearance comes in celebration of the 30th anniversary of Digable Planets’ debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space...
- 4/23/2024
- by Jo Vito
- Consequence - Music
Shabazz Palaces’s aptly titled Exotic Birds of Prey opens with a guarantee to spin “the latest in eclectic music.” Depending on your appetite for adventure, that will come off as a promise or a threat. Like last year’s Robed in Rareness, the album feels at times designed to weed out casual listeners, with Shabazz Palaces mastermind Ishmael Butler making no effort to sweeten his brash experimentalism with memorable hooks or conventional song structures.
Exotic Birds of Prey maintains an unsettling vibe as it wanders through hip-hop subgenres and warps them into abstractions of themselves. “Exotic Bop,” for one, feels chaotic and claustrophobic, with cavernous synths blurring the edges around guest Purple Tape Nate’s monotonously simple vocal melody. The glitched-out “Goat Me” similarly features reverb-drenched interjections from Cobra Coli buried beneath a spacious cloud-rap beat.
While Stas Thee Boss and Irene Barber offer a little more of substance on “Angela,...
Exotic Birds of Prey maintains an unsettling vibe as it wanders through hip-hop subgenres and warps them into abstractions of themselves. “Exotic Bop,” for one, feels chaotic and claustrophobic, with cavernous synths blurring the edges around guest Purple Tape Nate’s monotonously simple vocal melody. The glitched-out “Goat Me” similarly features reverb-drenched interjections from Cobra Coli buried beneath a spacious cloud-rap beat.
While Stas Thee Boss and Irene Barber offer a little more of substance on “Angela,...
- 3/25/2024
- by Nick Seip
- Slant Magazine
After marking their territory with their forward-thinking 2011 debut, Black Up, Shabazz Palaces—the brainchild of Ishmael Butler and Tendai “Baba” Maraire—has released a slew of projects that could be charitably characterized as intellectual exercises. And 2017’s Quazarz and 2020’s The Don of Diamond Dreams found the Afrofuturist group’s sound becoming abstract to the point of oversimplification. These albums are loaded with thin beats, sparse production choices, and lyrics that swing between haughty and nursery-rhyme plainness.
Shabazz Palaces’s sixth album—and second after Maraire’s departure from the group—Robed in Rareness continues in this stripped-down mode. It’s easily their least substantial work to date, running a scant 24 minutes and composed of seven tracks. And yet, it still includes meandering material like the barely thought-out “Scarface Mace” and the bland “Hustle Crossers.”
“Gel Bait,” a one-dimensional stab at belittling “stupid ass bitches trolling on the internet,” at...
Shabazz Palaces’s sixth album—and second after Maraire’s departure from the group—Robed in Rareness continues in this stripped-down mode. It’s easily their least substantial work to date, running a scant 24 minutes and composed of seven tracks. And yet, it still includes meandering material like the barely thought-out “Scarface Mace” and the bland “Hustle Crossers.”
“Gel Bait,” a one-dimensional stab at belittling “stupid ass bitches trolling on the internet,” at...
- 10/23/2023
- by Paul Attard
- Slant Magazine
Shabazz Palaces has announced Robed in Rareness, an upcoming mini-album out on October 27th via Sub Pop, and they’re offering a preview with the lead single “Binoculars” featuring Royce the Choice.
Led by hip-hop veteran Ishmael Butler, Robed in Rareness is Shabazz Palaces’ first collection of new material since their 2020 album The Don of Diamond Dreams. With this new mini-lp, “there’s a respectful eye on the past, an embrace of an ever-evolving present, and its feet are firmly planted in the future,” promises a press release.
Robed in Rareness also boasts collaborations with the likes of Porter Ray, O Finess, Lavarr the Starr, Geechi Suede, and Butler’s son, Lil Tracy, while Butler himself handled production and engineering. Pre-orders are ongoing.
“Binoculars” spotlights the more minimal side of Shabazz Palaces. It’s built on a pared-down beat that almost sounds like it was recorded in an empty cave,...
Led by hip-hop veteran Ishmael Butler, Robed in Rareness is Shabazz Palaces’ first collection of new material since their 2020 album The Don of Diamond Dreams. With this new mini-lp, “there’s a respectful eye on the past, an embrace of an ever-evolving present, and its feet are firmly planted in the future,” promises a press release.
Robed in Rareness also boasts collaborations with the likes of Porter Ray, O Finess, Lavarr the Starr, Geechi Suede, and Butler’s son, Lil Tracy, while Butler himself handled production and engineering. Pre-orders are ongoing.
“Binoculars” spotlights the more minimal side of Shabazz Palaces. It’s built on a pared-down beat that almost sounds like it was recorded in an empty cave,...
- 8/23/2023
- by Abby Jones
- Consequence - Music
Futuristic NYC avant-rockers Battles have announced the upcoming release of their fourth album, Juice B Crypts. Due in October via Warp, the record finds the band scaling back to the duo of guitarist-keyboardist Ian Williams and drummer John Stanier, following the departure of bassist Dave Konopka in 2018. Much like the group’s second LP, 2011’s Gloss Drop, Juice B Crypts will feature a wealth of guest vocalists; one of those singers, Sal Principato of NYC dance-punk pioneers Liquid Liquid, appears on new single “Titanium 2 Step.”
The track pairs a lean,...
The track pairs a lean,...
- 8/7/2019
- by Hank Shteamer
- Rollingstone.com
Flying Lotus, Flamagra
One might think of Flamagra as Ellison’s Apocalypse Now, or The Wall — it shows an artist at the height of their power, able to realize their most over-the-top imaginings, delivering a sprawling near-masterpiece teetering at the brink of overkill. The cast is full on: jazz fusion icon Herbie Hancocke ancock and P-Funk mastermind George Clinton represent for the old school; Solange, Tierra Whack, Anderson Paak, and Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler provide varying shades of the new. Will Hermes
Cate Le Bon, Reward
Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album,...
One might think of Flamagra as Ellison’s Apocalypse Now, or The Wall — it shows an artist at the height of their power, able to realize their most over-the-top imaginings, delivering a sprawling near-masterpiece teetering at the brink of overkill. The cast is full on: jazz fusion icon Herbie Hancocke ancock and P-Funk mastermind George Clinton represent for the old school; Solange, Tierra Whack, Anderson Paak, and Shabazz Palaces’ Ishmael Butler provide varying shades of the new. Will Hermes
Cate Le Bon, Reward
Cate Le Bon’s fifth studio album,...
- 6/3/2019
- by Will Hermes, Angie Martoccio, Daniela Tijerina, Jonathan Bernstein, Elias Leight, Jon Dolan, Danny Schwartz and Sarah Grant
- Rollingstone.com
In the decade or so since Stephen Ellison released his breakout Los Angeles LP, he’s established himself as hip-hop’s headiest auteur, a maximalist Brian Eno for the medical marijuana age whose meteor-storm productions triangulate funk, electronica, and assorted jazz fusions, and are attached to out-there film projects and a live show that updates the psychedelic eye candy of golden-age Pink Floyd. Flying Lotus beats have rootstock in West Coast strains (Madlib, the Stones Throw Records school, the Dr. Dre – Snoop Dogg G-funk axis). The Midwest is in there,...
- 5/23/2019
- by Will Hermes
- Rollingstone.com
According to Deadline.com, Q-Tip is partnering with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill to develop a TV series based on the rapper's experiences with the Native Tongues collective, a loose late Eighties alliance between his A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, Queen Latifah, Monie Love and more. The trio's show will reflect on the posse's friendship and how their music influenced younger rappers.
Why The Low End Theory Is One of the 500 Greatest Albums
Native Tongues blazed alternative rap trails with their laid-back, witty and progressive styles.
Why The Low End Theory Is One of the 500 Greatest Albums
Native Tongues blazed alternative rap trails with their laid-back, witty and progressive styles.
- 1/10/2014
- Rollingstone.com
Countless pop artists have attempted to reinvent themselves in the public eye, and many have failed miserably. Perhaps it was prescient, then, that Seattle’s Ishmael Butler called himself Butterfly nearly two decades ago, when he was the helium-voiced street shaman at the heart of Digable Planets. After 16 years of relative silence (he did some guest spots and fronted a failed funk-rap outfit), Butler has accomplished the nigh-impossible, successfully metamorphosing into the shadowy Shabazz Palaces, and with Black Up, creating a potential successor to Cannibal Ox’s 2001 alt-rap masterpiece, The Cold Vein. The Shabazz sound splits the difference ...
- 6/28/2011
- avclub.com
Vampire Weekend, Janelle Monáe and more have provided the soundtrack for the first six months of the year, in Bigger Than the Sound.
By James Montgomery
Bigger Than The Sound's Best Albums of 2010 (So Far)
Photo: MTV News
The first half of 2010 is in the books, and if you're a fan of oil spills, Tea Parties and vuvuzelas, well, congratulations on having the best six months of your entire life.
For the rest of us, January through June has been a bit of a bummer. If you're like me, you've found refuge from the bad news in good music, and thankfully, there's been a whole lot of that so far this year too.
If you've been asleep at the switch (or hiding out in your bunker), I don't blame you. But there's really no excuse for missing out on soul-charging, life-changing music — even if some of it really is pretty sad.
By James Montgomery
Bigger Than The Sound's Best Albums of 2010 (So Far)
Photo: MTV News
The first half of 2010 is in the books, and if you're a fan of oil spills, Tea Parties and vuvuzelas, well, congratulations on having the best six months of your entire life.
For the rest of us, January through June has been a bit of a bummer. If you're like me, you've found refuge from the bad news in good music, and thankfully, there's been a whole lot of that so far this year too.
If you've been asleep at the switch (or hiding out in your bunker), I don't blame you. But there's really no excuse for missing out on soul-charging, life-changing music — even if some of it really is pretty sad.
- 6/30/2010
- MTV Music News
Vampire Weekend, Janelle Monáe and more have provided the soundtrack for the first six months of the year, in Bigger Than the Sound.
By James Montgomery
Bigger Than The Sound's Best Albums of 2010 (So Far)
Photo: MTV News
The first half of 2010 is in the books, and if you're a fan of oil spills, Tea Parties and vuvuzelas, well, congratulations on having the best six months of your entire life.
For the rest of us, January through June has been a bit of a bummer. If you're like me, you've found refuge from the bad news in good music, and thankfully, there's been a whole lot of that so far this year too.
If you've been asleep at the switch (or hiding out in your bunker), I don't blame you. But there's really no excuse for missing out on soul-charging, life-changing music — even if some of it really is pretty sad.
By James Montgomery
Bigger Than The Sound's Best Albums of 2010 (So Far)
Photo: MTV News
The first half of 2010 is in the books, and if you're a fan of oil spills, Tea Parties and vuvuzelas, well, congratulations on having the best six months of your entire life.
For the rest of us, January through June has been a bit of a bummer. If you're like me, you've found refuge from the bad news in good music, and thankfully, there's been a whole lot of that so far this year too.
If you've been asleep at the switch (or hiding out in your bunker), I don't blame you. But there's really no excuse for missing out on soul-charging, life-changing music — even if some of it really is pretty sad.
- 6/29/2010
- MTV Music News
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