Shabazz Palaces Raises the Bar on "Lese Majesty"

Palaceer Lazaro would prefer you didn't call him Ishmael. Ishmael Butler, that is, his given name and the one he doesn’t use as the more visible half of Seattle’s premier experimental hip-hop outfit, Shabazz Palaces. The enforced misdirection is emblematic of Lazaro’s style: a past-meets-present bag of quirks and high-minded hip-hop driven by a nonconformist spurning of the straightforward. Thus, the title of the duo’s newest offering is in a foreign language. “Lese Majesty,” or lèse-majesté, comes from antiquated French law and describes a punishable crime against royalty. With uncharacteristic candor in an interview with NPR, Lazaro spelled out exactly what royalty he and multi-instrumentalist Tendai “Baba” Maraire aim to “attack” with their sophomore record: your ego, or, in his words, “me-mania.” In a nutshell, “me-mania” seems to be that often-decried vice of the millennial generation—shameless self-absorption exacerbated by universal access to digital ego-enablers like social media and the blogosphere. It’s easy to write off as old-man platitude (because a former member of ’90s jazz rap trio Digable Planets complaining about the self-image of today’s youth smacks heavily of your grandfather asking why you take so many selfies at Sunday dinner), but Lazaro isn’t some disgruntled codger critiquing from past his time, and he’s boldly willing to lump the current reigning hip-hop overlords under his pejorative. “Lese Majesty,” he holds, is the answer and rebuttal to the stasis of fame-crazed rappers, fixated on materialism and forerunning personality politics ahead of their music. Coming from a guy whose moniker has a moniker, it’s simultaneously admirable and dubious, but the prominence of unadulterated musical creativity of “Majesty” puts almost all doubt to rest.

Whereas the focus of the duo’s critically acclaimed 2011 debut, “Black Up,” rested unwaveringly on Lazaro’s lyricism, in “Lese Majesty,” it is the musical production in the limelight. For its ethereal, retro-techno eminence, Lazaro’s rhymes often take a backseat, relegated to stand at the end of stylish, bouncing synth lines, or transmitted to the listener through a haze of nebular interference. Here is that pushing of boundaries that Lazaro sees missing in “me-mania” music royalty. Right off the bat in “Dawn in Luxor,” the duo serves up a reverberating, genre-defying eccentricity that seems to insinuate through negation exactly what today’s hip-hop nobility doesn’t have. And that’s before Lazaro starts blustering about “throwing cocktails at the Führer.” The album’s individual tracks are grouped sonically and thematically into seven suites, a move that by itself indicates the the creative refinement to which the group aspires. The suites are seamlessly and often surprisingly arranged, as exemplified by the masterful way that the lurching synths of “Harlem Aria” settle into the minimal spoken-word-pace of “Noetic Noiromantics.” Such meticulousness does, however, come at the expense of the discrete boundaries of the tracks—there’s no sure-fire single here. Instead, the songs ebb and flow into each other with the fluidity of smoke fingers wafting from a long stick of aural incense.

Though at times listeners may have to concentrate quite hard to hear it, “Majesty” does contain a wholesome load of Lazaro’s wordplay. As in “Black Up,” he’s intelligent and wide-thinking, but now, more so than before, he’s gleefully elusive, perhaps impenetrable, and perhaps incomprehensible. He also works on his own time. In “Dawn in Luxor,” he flatlines the word “glitter” for four bars before he offers up the pay-off: “Glitter and gold, there’ll always be a difference.” Sometimes he just seems to be showing off (in “They Came in Gold,” “Farcical, quite simply it is him / It’s black—ephilic and petalistic catastrophic hymns”); others he’s absurd (in “Solemn Swears,” “I’m very nice like Jerry Rice.... I’m coming up like Donald Duck”), and every once in a while it’s not clear if he’s even making sense (in “Ishmael,” “Between hell and high water he froze”). But Lazaro’s rhymes are the most fulfilling when the authorial intent is ambiguous. In “#CAKE” he repeats the line “Having my cake, and I’m eating cake” between day-to-day life vignettes like, “She set my mood, I push back the rope.” The song concludes with a rather long list of exotic destinations, presumably places he’s jet-setted off to.

But what’s Lazaro doing? Satirizing capitalist greed and society’s social-media-abetted have-it-all ideology? Engaging in classic hip-hop bravado couched in a repurposed cliché? Whatever the hell he wants? Throughout the album, the sense pervades that Lazaro wants to keep you guessing, or if not that, then at least listening for what phrase he’ll turn next. That’s actually the general listening experience of “Lese Majesty”—it’s enticing because it’s unfamiliar and provocative. It’s a standout album because it meets and exceeds the high standard of creativity to which Lazaro and Maraire challenge the entire genre to rise.

—Staff writer Caleb M. Lewis can be reached at clewis01@college.harvard.edu.