Shabazz Palaces’ “Shine a Light” Is a Sci-Fi Rap Epic
Listening to Shabazz Palaces—the duo of jazz-rap dynamo Ishmael Butler and multi-instrumentalist Tendai Maraire—forces conventional rap consumers to realign their thinking. Their new album, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, continues their quest to explore the fringes. “Shine Light,” its first offering, is an introduction to the album’s titular character Quazarz, a “sentient being from somewhere else” stranded on our planet, surrounded by the “ethers of the Migosphere here on Drake world.” Told through wisps of soliloquy and waves of distorted vocoder, the song finds this literal light rider in the midst of his own rap fantasy. The concept, though rooted in science fiction, seems pretty simple: Space gangstas like Quazarz aren’t that different from those on Earth.
On “Shine a Light,” Ishmael Butler connects his stanzas in a series of tumbling fragments that recall a kind of Shakespearean rap dialect. “Gorgeous dashing/Waves crashing, mind elastics/Smooth action/The Cadillacs was backed in (Why?)/You may need to get in the trunk or in the wind (Fast),” he raps neatly in the song’s only complete verse. In the lyric video, the song’s phrases streak across the screen, each syllable aglow in spotlight, and that’s how Butler’s wordiness is often digested: every phonetic sound flashes through the brain before linking and unspooling ideas. The verse is bookended by repeated, AutoTuned phrases from guest Thaddillac that shift subtly in pitch and grow in intensity, providing a mantra in step with the unwritten rules of Earthly rap: “Shine a light on the fake.” As Shabazz Palaces gear up for their sci-fi rap epic, they repurpose a sample of Dee Dee Sharp’s “I Really Love You” to create something both otherworldly and familiar.
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