Shabazz Palaces
American musical group; hip hop band
Shabazz Palaces is a Seattle-based hip hop group led by Ishmael Butler a.k.a. Palaceer Lazaro (formerly Butterfly of jazz rap group Digable Planets).
Much of Butler's work as Shabazz Palaces was made in collaboration with multi-instrumentalist Tendai "Baba" Maraire, son of mbira master Dumisani Maraire. Maraire left the group before the release of their fifth album in 2020.
Shabazz Palaces has released seven studio albums on Sub Pop between 2011 and 2024 after self-releasing two EPs in 2009.
Biography
Two anonymously self-released EPs titled Shabazz Palaces and Of Light in 2009 led to Shabazz Palaces becoming the first hip-hop act to be signed to Sub Pop. Their debut full-length album, Black Up, was released on June 28, 2011 to widespread critical acclaim. In 2019, Pitchfork ranked Black Up at number 179 on their list of "The 200 Best Albums of the 2010s"; cultural critic Hanif Abdurraqib wrote: "From great mystery exploded an album of impossible vision".
Their second album, Lese Majesty, was released on July 29, 2014 days after premiering at the 'Laser Dome' in Seattle's Pacific Science Center.
On July 14, 2017, Shabazz Palaces released its third and fourth full-length records concurrently.
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This entry incorporates text from “Shabazz Palaces” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.