TOWN LOVE is an online art museum dedicated to celebrating the vibrant past and present of Northwest Hip-Hop. You can browse by artist or browse by year.

This gallery page is organized to highlight the creative work of

Artist: Shabazz Palaces

As you scroll, items are sorted from most recent to earliest.

A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Live At Sasquatch 2010

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Live At Sasquatch 2010 was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Live At KEXP

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Live At KEXP was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Live At Third Man Records

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Do you know something about the history of this record? Do you have a favorite lyric or a favorite memory? Send us an email on why this is one of the great hip-hop albums from the Northwest. Thanks!

Live At Third Man Records was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

The Don Of Diamond Dreams

In their annual year-end critics’ poll, The Seattle Times ranked The Don Of Diamond Dreams as the very best Seattle album of 2020, saying:

Ishmael Butler is a Seattle original. The enigmatic rapper/producer has been at hip-hop’s vanguard since Digable Planets’ Grammy-winning heyday in the early ’90s. During the past decade, the onetime jazz-rap leader and, ahem, Seattle Times paperboy became an influential alt-rap figure, further expanding the art form through Shabazz Palaces’ polyrhythms and Afrofuturist touch. This spring’s Sub Pop-issued The Don of Diamond Dreams ranks among the best work of Butler’s illustrious career, showing he hasn’t stopped moving forward in three decades.

Butler makes literary sport of hip-hop’s braggadocio traditions, name-checking 1920s French actors, and “catching mermaids without no hook” on the hypnotizing “Chocolate Souffle.” Elsewhere, the warped funk of “Fast Learner” is fit for an intergalactic space cruise or midnight drive through neon-lit streets. In a year when local hip-hop shined so brightly — and some in the mainstream might be catching up to his star-surfing ways — amid a tumultuous start of a new decade, there’s comfort knowing this Seattle visionary still carries a guiding torch.

The Don Of Diamond Dreams was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Black Up

Seattle hip-hop blog 206UP picked this record as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2011,” saying that:

At this moment in time, it’s impossible to place Black Up into appropriate hip-hop context. But that’s because (and any theoretical physicist will tell you this) time itself is merely an illusion. Similar to the career of Shabazz Palaces’ primary motivating force, Palaceer Lazaro (earthly name: Ishmael Butler), the sounds on Black Up ascend to the stratosphere, only to dissipate and fall invisibly to the terra firma where the music is reformed into new lyrical notions and sonic movements. The sounds here are transient, but everything in Butler’s past seems to have been pointing to this moment.

If you had to pinpoint an origin for Black Up, you would say its spirit is rooted most firmly in Africa. The Palaceer’s words stay tethered to a motherland but course off in many directions, just like peoples disseminated (by choice and by force) across the globe. As I type this, Shabazz Palaces is spreading its ethereal sound across parts of Europe, and will likely move beyond that continent. How fortunate we are in Seattle then, to be able to call our city SP’s corporeal home. I don’t think many people in The Town realized a spirit like Shabazz’s existed in their midst. Seattleites (and the world), take note: If that’s cream you’re putting in your coffee — don’t. Better to drink the elixir Black.

Black Up was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Of Light

Seattle hip-hop blog 206UP picked this record as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2009,” saying that:

One of the five most creative and forward-thinking hip-hop albums of the decade. Everything about this album seems like it was pre-meditated. From the esoteric packaging to the intentionally veiled identity of the project’s main participant, to the deliberate pace of its “marketing” roll-out. Shabazz Palaces represents everything that is good about hip-hop. It casts a dark shadow over the genre’s vapid and disposable popular product, and illuminates hip-hop’s unlimited potential as a subversive course to self-awareness and urban pedagogy.

Of Light was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star

The 1991 novel Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis tells the story of an alien who experiences time backward, and who is perplexed by all our human behavior throughout the 20th century, where people become sick after visiting the hospital, and where the Holocaust births millions of new humans. Shabazz Palaces’s twin 2017 albums are concepted around a similar tale: Quazarz, the extraterrestrial, trying to make sense of contemporary America: Our capitalism, our fake news, our police brutality, and our smartphone obsessions. Throughout the verses, you’ll recognize your own habits and values reflected back, and see them as equally perplexing and strange. This second record, Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, was originally conceived of as bonus material for the first (Jealous Machines) before taking on a life of its own. Songs have a stasis, a hazy quality, echoes of spare drums, and barely-there beats that stubbornly refuse to groove. Still, tracks like “Eel Dreams” and the Kraftwerk-inspired “Moon Whip Quäz” find their own abstract way to rock, taking you on a mystical space-travel journey. Overall, there’s an ease to the music on this record, an exploration of artists hanging out and playing and innovating, unconcerned with convention or commercial viability. Influences pull from everywhere: improvisation, sampler-based free-jazz, indie, and prog-rock, fusing the sound waves into a truly unique sonic landscape. This record opens your eyes. We’re all Quazarz. Our world is a confusing and magical place.

Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Eagles Soar, Oil Flows

“See I’m just like you, yeah I know I’m a mess / Take a minute to thank, take an hour to dress / Got this pain in my neck, pain from starin’ at stars / I can’t find the remote, drinkin’ drivin’ my car… SLOW DOWN! For what? Slow down! For what?”

I’ve been listening to a lot of Seattle hip-hop classics lately, like this 2009 debut EP from Shabazz Palaces, alternately called Eagles Soar, Oil Flows or simply the Shabazz Palaces EP. I was talking with someone at a show about how what’s amazing with this group are all the ways they’re breaking all the so-called “rules” all at the same time. Some of this music is out of time, sometimes out-of-phase, the bass and treble levels inverted and broken, instruments arrive in and quickly depart with seeming randomness, or wait, is this just two guys with drums?!?

An elusive chorus finally presents itself just as the song is ending… This, bouncing beat, sometimes hostility, is then interposed with moments of such intense charm and beauty. There’s an exacting precision here. It’s like listening to… I don’t know. There’s nothing really like this. Lives are lived in this span of time.

Eagles Soar, Oil Flows was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Lese Majesty

If you’ve ever watched a sunrise, there’s this moment when the sun suddenly, miraculously appears, and all the shadows infinitely elongate, and you’re blinded by color and shaken by the experience. That’s a pretty accurate way to describe Lese Majesty a 2014 album from Shabazz Palaces. This album sounds like nothing else. The first few times I heard it, I found it so dense and foreign and perplexing that it sat on my shelf a long time, but lately has navigated a place in the regular rotation. This cover is an odd rubberized paper, deeply tactile. The music: deeply tactile as well.

Lese Majesty was created in and features appearances from:

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A film about Northwest hip-hop from

Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines

Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines, the first of twin 2017 releases from Shabazz Palaces, isn’t a traditional record: This is a visceral auditory experience. It blows up every preconception you had about music. As you read this review on your “glowing phantom limb …swiping all the time,” consider the following description: Try as you might, you will struggle to latch onto a center in this music. It moves, certainly, it shimmies and sways, it has beats-per-minute, yes—though rarely the same from bar-to-bar. These are sounds you experience emerging from your bones at a cellular level rather than, say, through your ears as all other music has worked for millennia. There are moments on this record, especially at the right volume, that you hear it beating from inside your body, like exhuming a long-dormant language you used to speak. Primal DNA music. Ishmael Butler raps on the first track: “Pay attention close you kids, this the shit don’t got no lid,” and he’s right. These songs will take you down a path of hypnosis: My mind traveled to far-off corners, lost memories, and summoned recollections that I’d long forgotten. Listening to Quazarz cracks open a door in your mind, like during the transfixingly long instrumental section at the end of “Effeminence.” The beat on “Julian’s Dream (ode to a bad)” is nonsensically, cheesily spectacular. And the verses on this same song will have your mouth dry with a hunger for the wanting of fruit and sunny summer days. Okay Seattle, the Shabazz Palaces crew have dropped the gauntlet: How do you reply?

The Stranger picked Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines as one of the “Top 10 Albums of 2017,” saying that:

Deciding between Shabazz Palace’s excellent two-album set that came out in July, I’m going with Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines. On it, we’ve been graciously invited to inhabit the cosmic cool that is part of Ishmael Butler and Tendai Maraire’s universe. This album is pure pleasure from start to finish, from the rapturous rhymes to the freakishly weird beats and the elegant, preternatural soundscapes. Also wins the award for best album of the year to listen to when getting blazingly high with your deepest, dankest bud.

Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines was created in and features appearances from:

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