It's a Style Sport

With bravado, precision, and mesmerizing authenticity, ever-evolving musician, producer, and rapper Ishmael Butler returns as Shabazz Palaces with It’s a Style Sport, out on Oct 23 via Sub Pop Records. Following 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey, It’s a Style Sport stays true to Shabazz Palaces' form in its daring show of experimental, avant-hip-hop and free-form poetry, but also reveals a more reflective and upfront side of the Seattle-based musician than we’ve seen before. It’s a Style Sport finds Butler compiling what he’s learned from his storied, dense career into a playful, shimmering portal, again proving himself an artist of chameleonic ambition, fueled by curiosity, courage, and a limitless imagination. 

Butler’s work has long been situated in the canon of Afrofuturist trailblazers like Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, and Pharoah Saunders, and for good reason – his work resides along the edges of the surreal, crafted with soundscapes and stories that are speculative, unapologetically Black, and ooze wonder of a different realm. Yet here, we see the rapper engaging in what could be considered an “Afro-fractal” poetic, what the artist Char Jeré describes as “a way of defiling a linear, colonial, capitalist temporality. It makes the future less of a destination and more of an ongoing rehearsal or ritual. The future and the past are happening constantly and simultaneously.” On It’s a Style Sport, a visage of Butler’s past lives as a rapper and performer is flung up against his contemporary persona, taunting and illuminating. At its core, It’s a Style Sport is an ode to the rap game of years past, when the playfully competitive ambition drove the genre to always outdo, outrun, and out-finesse your peers

In contrast to the social-media-centered strategy of today’s music business, with artists and labels hyper-focused on “brands” and “identity”, here, Butler gives homage to the oft-forgotten honor of exceptional showmanship. “Taking it back to what rap is really all about,” he explains. “Or at least what it says it was about. This kind of tough, friendly competition to see who could out-style the next person with surface stuff, but also substance as well.” It’s true Butler isn’t afraid of being opaque, esoteric, or illegible – each Shabazz Palaces release boasts a complete reinvention and upending of the form, uninterested in comparison and challenging understanding. But It’s a Style Sport dons an open self-awareness, with the spotlight pointed back at himself. A desire for realness trumpets throughout the album as we follow the artist as he looks at his past, the choices he’s made, and the world he envisions for every future yet to come, all packaged in inventive, complex production and deliciously hypnotic rhyme flow. 

To record, Butler gathered together his closest collaborators and friends for eight days at Seattle’s Hall of Justice Studios. With blueprints of each song in hand, he allowed his friends to play, explore, and experiment until the songs took shape. Contributions include Evan Flory-Barnes on upright and electric bass; Thaddeus Turner on guitar, keyboards, and vocals; Kassa Overall on drums; Gerald Turner on bass and vocals; Marquetta Miller on vocals; and Carlos Overall on saxophone. Butler’s longtime friend and collaborator Erik Blood also provided instrumentation, production, and mixing. It was important to Butler that the recording process feel collaborative and communal, an effort made even easier by the fact that every musician has been in the touring bands for Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets for five to ten years. The longevity and closeness of their relationships made for a convivial and familiar energy, and underscores Butler’s goal to craft an album that confidently flexes the unique and pristine prowess contained in the Shabazz universe. 

The album opens with the thumping meditation “Ahh World (I Won The Alpha Bet)”, with Butler taking on the role of an all-knowing narrator, telling the story of his own life and rise to excellence from a fantasy-fueled third-person perspective, and ending with a list of rules – directives for a successful life. What’s made clear here, and what pumps through the heart of the rest of the album, is that his parameter of success is tied to the value of one’s character – how good can you be? How noble? How honest? Butler deals out flair while staying grounded in what matters most: his own honor. “Show Me Missouri in Mink” pivots to a melodic R&B flow, chronicling passages of his life and, again, speaking from the vantage point of someone who’s accrued a wealth of wisdom from decades of living and mistake-making, daring the listener to move with righteousness. “Every heart’s for sale, it seems”, he sings. “Everybody selling dreams/You could tell me anything/You’ve got to show me what you mean.” 

It’s not just careful, cautionary tales Butler extolls, though. Playful production and cheeky storytelling abounds, especially on “Tongue In Chic”, a whimsical pop number where Butler chronicles perilous dating attempts over punchy drums, Prince-like guitar licks, and 80s Italo disco synth melodies. “New girlfriend, that’s what I need,” he repeats again and again with a charming, teenage earnestness. 

Album closer “From One Future To Another” is one of the most captivating moments on the collection, opening with sparse upright bass and cymbal brushes before blossoming into a fuzzed-out, swirling, live-band kaleidoscope that brings to mind Slowdive, Yo La Tengo, and Stereolab all at once. In a honeyed falsetto, Butler sings of “Ghost torn lingering memories” and gaining back “the time that’s gone”. It’s an appropriate conclusion to the saga Butler’s penned – It’s a Style Sport is less about Butler looking back with nostalgia, and instead letting each iteration of time – past and future – return to him and touch him, before drifting away again. In this realm, where time is a multi-shaped fractal, everything is futurity: unpredictable, otherworldly, and unequivocally ours for the taking, ours for the making. Butler is neither attempting to repeat what he’s done before, nor outdo himself. But even in this galaxy, where time exists in a kind of recursive spiral, refracted slivers of bouncing light, Butler holds tight to his principled conviction, refuting vague, empty performativity in pursuit of something deeper, grander, truer, and altogether more impressive: “The surface belies the depth within/Must we be beautiful to win/Praise success reward and gains/No matter what our dreams remain.”