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Shabazz Palaces brings experimental hip-hop to Portsmouth

Hip-hop luminary Ishmael Butler, frontman of Shabazz Palaces, is always content to let the experimental group’s astral soundscapes and lyrical dualities speak for themselves. However, the Grammy Award-winner has plenty to say about the state of the world.

Throughout his career, Butler has constantly reinvented himself in pursuit of innovation. In the early 1990s, he was known as Butterfly in the jazz/hip-hop trio Digable Planets, as the electro-funk crooner Cherrywine in the early 2000s, and, since 2009, as Palaceer Lazaro, who performs alongside multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire.

At the celebrated indie label Sub Pop, he’s a revolutionary artist whose two albums have put the label on the map for avant-garde hip-hop. Now, he’s an A&R representative, too. Shabazz Palaces come to Portsmouth for a show at 3S Artspace on Thursday, Aug. 6. The Sound reached Butler by phone to discuss social media, police shootings, ghostwriting, and the state of hip-hop in America.

You just finished touring the world. Have you ever played New Hampshire before?
I don’t think I’ve ever played (music) in New Hampshire before. I think I played hoop there. We played UNH one time when I was at UMass. That was the only time I’ve been there.

You were at UMass in the late ’80s. Did UNH have much of a team back then?
It was a tough game. We won on a last-second shot, I remember that.

You have an Instagram account now. I know you’ve taken issue with some aspects of social media; has that opinion changed at all?
No, I feel like it’s being abused, used for the recreational, superficial thing that is taking on a lot more relevance and weight in our society … more than I think it deserves or even thought it would get to. It’s just sort of run wild, so it hasn’t changed at all. I was never against it, it just seemed a bit like it’s getting out of hand in so many ways. I couldn’t even begin to start talking about it unless we had two or three hours (laughs). The self-absorption that it’s promoting and helping to proliferate is a little disturbing. But it’s cool to look at and participate in sometimes.

Do you see any value in it?
It’s just like drinking a soda, you know what I mean? It’s something you do every once in a while and it’s sugary and sweet and brings you up for a few minutes, but when it really sinks in, you have a crash and realize it probably wasn’t that good for you in the first place. It doesn’t hurt bad, but if you do too much of it you’ll run into problems.

You’ve previously stated that music isn’t coming out of you — it’s happening to you. How much of that do you control before you go into the studio?
Well, I practice a lot. All the rote shit you gotta do — scales, chords, and notes, just getting stuff under your fingers. Listening to music and listening to it critically and imaginatively trying to figure out what cats you like are doing. (There’s) all that kind of stuff beforehand and then when you go in, you’re trying to capture your instincts. Then you have all that practice stuff to fall back on so you can get a decent flow. You have the capability to capture your instincts and get it down.

How much writing do you do beforehand and how much takes place in the studio in the moment?
It’s all in the moment. The moment might pass in August and be revisited in June, but it’s all captured moments that are then molded and shaped and tweaked and morphed and brought into other moments. It’s hard to say, I can’t even remember the origins of many of the songs I’ve done, but that’s how it goes.

There’s a race war going on … The fact that hip-hop isn’t really responding to that in any substantial way is un-hip-hop-like to me.

You’re an A&R rep for Sub Pop. What kind of stuff do you gravitate toward? What or who do you find compelling these days?
Can’t talk about who, but I like all kinds of what people would call genres. I don’t look for anything in particular other than some excitement, some passion that breeds excitement when you listen to it. Imagination, courage, that natural, instinctive intelligence — not some really thought-out, cerebral stuff. Sometimes that works, but I just like the natural passion.

What’s your take on ghost­writing in hip-hop?
I don’t think rappers should necessarily need a ghostwriter, but I don’t think the Drake situation is a ghostwriting situation. I mean, I don’t know, but cats aren’t really writing words that seem they would need someone else to write them. So there (are) people that have fame and those sort of personalities and they need to maintain that with volume. Perhaps it gets hard for them to do that and they just need to enlist some help to do it. I don’t think anyone is incapable of writing a modern-day rap song; they’re almost like nursery rhymes. If other people are participating in it, I don’t really see a problem with it, because it’s not that serious.  Also, I think a lot of times when guys like Drake — (he’s) hit it big, obviously he’s capable of writing a hit song on his own so he might, in order to get one of (his) homies a revenue stream for the rest of his life, maybe put a credit on a song, so now the guy gets a check from royalties or proceeds. But I don’t know, man, I wouldn’t do it, you know what I’m saying? But I’m not going to cast aspersions on it because I don’t know the situations behind all of the reasons why people might do it. Some people are good at delivering, with emotion, a song that they didn’t write. I don’t really care, truth be told.

How are you feeling about the state of hip-hop?
I don’t think it’s separate from the state of America or the world economy. It’s just a smaller study on all of those things. To contemplate it as a thing of its own, you have to set aside so many contributing factors to it. And most people don’t have the knowledge to combine all of those things and then come up with a solid and lucid answer, me being one of them. So I don’t even think of it like that. The state of American hip-hop, it seems energetic, but the energy somehow has a lazy bend to it. They seem to be relying on tropes; there are a lot of different versions of the same song. Beat and cadence, subject matter — it’s almost like there’s a legend of words you can pull from over and over again. There’s a lot of disposability. You hear a song that sounds cool for a couple of listens, but after that you’ve gotten to the depth of the song pretty rapidly. It is what it is, but I don’t like to look at things only critically, you know? There’s a lot of fun and enjoyment that’s being had, there are catchy things going on with poetics and wordplay. Every once in awhile there are glimmers of really cool stuff coming out, too. I mean, America’s fucked, man. All the substantial things are dwindling. There’s a race war going on, initiated by the white supremacist right-wing. And the arm of their power is basically terrorizing non-white people with the police force. The fact that hip-hop isn’t really responding to that in any substantial way is un-hip-hop-like to me. It goes to show how far we’ve gotten away from the essences of what the culture was about.

Have you been reading about the release of the video of a University of Cincinnati police officer shooting Samuel DuBose?
I’ll say this: We need to get away from the narrative that the police (promote) when that happens. We need to protest and get them to behave correctly. They’re doing what they are supposed to do. They are an operating hand of a faction that wants to terrorize and keep a certain population under control and instill fear in us. So this notion that we need to kick in and do the right thing isn’t the right conversation, I think. They’re doing what they’re supposed to do and we need to do what we’re supposed to do as people in opposition to that. What that is, it’s up for de