Shabazz Palaces Resist Profiling on Elusive ‘Exotic Birds of Prey’
Following Robed in Rareness from last fall, Shabazz Palaces continues a provisional series with the cryptic and digressive Exotic Birds of Prey.
shabazz palaces
Featured: Top of Home Page/Features/Lists/Music/Music Features/PopMatters Picks/The Best Music of 2023
The 21 Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2023
The best hip-hop albums celebrate classic styles with new approaches, blend rap with electronic, jazz, and soul, and push the boundaries of genre.
‘Robed in Rareness’ Elaborates Shabazz Palaces’ Afrofuturism
On Robed in Rareness, Ishmael Butler aka Shabazz Palaces takes yet another step in his forward-thinking, far-sighted project of Afrofuturistic hip-hop.
The 75 Best Songs of 2011
Nostalgia Alert! Jump back a decade and enjoy the best songs of 2011. They are headlined by a synthpop classic, a massive hit from a hot diva, pristine harmonies of a young band headed for greatness.
The Best Hip-Hop Albums of 2011
2011 was a year of great diversity, in which rap fans were faced with enough variety to find whatever flavor of hip-hop they wanted.
Shabazz Palaces Bring the Funk on “Bad Bitch Walking” (premiere)
A sultry, locomotive shuffle of hip-hop and hot blue funk, Shabazz Palaces' "Bad Bitch Walking" features Ishmael Butler as a susurrating lover whose languid gaze of a woman is slowly supplanted by the erotic ellipses of female motion.
Hip-Hop Since the Don of Rhyme: Shabazz Palaces’ ‘The Don of Diamond Dreams’
With the release of Shabazz Palaces’ The Don of Diamond Dreams, producer-rapper Ishmael Butler envisions yet another lunar world of sound disturbed by his anxieties and desires.
20 Questions: Ishmael Butler from Shabazz Palaces and Knife Knights
Our 20 Questions feature sums up the quality that Shabazz Palaces' Ishmael Butler only reveals once you get to talking with him: his dry, clipped humor.
Porter’s Head: Rapper Porter Ray on His Latest Hip-Hop Opus, ‘Eye of the Beholder’
Bridging disparate influences like Portishead and Das EFX in his multifarious hip-hop, Porter Ray waxes poetically about the troubles in own his life and in the world around him in this interview.
Sci-Fi Goes Hi-Fi: 10 Artists’ Foray into Hip-Hop Futurism
A host of artists have carved out a niche in the interplanetary margins that now rest in hip-hop culture. Some call it an expansion on Afrofuturist philosophies; others simply a long-time propensity for the science-fiction genre.
Shabazz Palaces – “Since C.A.Y.A.” (Singles Going Steady)
Aggressively experimental, "Since C.A.Y.A." is dissonant and schizophrenic with beats going all over the place and plenty of tasty sonic treats weaving in and out of the track.
Porter Ray: Watercolor
Porter Ray's rapping on Watercolor is relaxed but quick, a style that emphasizes the intellectual bent to many of his rhymes, but intentionally fails to prepare you for the weight of his message.
![Call for Papers: All Things Reconsidered [MUSIC] May-August 2024](https://www.popmatters.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/all-things-reconsidered-call-music-may-2024-720x380.jpg)
