It's a Style Sport
type: Product
description: 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 peersIn 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 ex…
brand: Shabazz Palaces
sku: 717150
additional property: Format
  type: PropertyValue
  value: Loser (color) LP, CD, Digital
offers: AggregateOffer
  low price: 10.00
  high price: 23.00
  price currency: USD
  offer count: 3
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    price: 23.00
    price currency: USD
    availability: https://schema.org/InStock
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    sku: 717150
  offers: Offer
    price: 12.00
    price currency: USD
    availability: https://schema.org/InStock
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    sku: 717152
  offers: Offer
    price: 10.00
    price currency: USD
    availability: https://schema.org/InStock
    item condition: https://schema.org/NewCondition
    sku: 717156

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