Quick Take #3: Shabazz Palaces - “A treatease dedicated to The Avian Airess from North East Nubis (1000 questions, 1 answer)” (2011)

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Quick Takes is an occasional column in which we choose any song that we’re currently listening to – old or new, pop or rock, jazz or folk or blues, or anything else under the sun that can be spun. One of us writes up one or two short paragraphs on some of our general thoughts about the track, and our partner takes another couple paragraphs to respond. The rest is up to you, dear reader.

For this entry, we consider a track from Shabazz Palaces album Black Up.

Aaron: While I don’t listen to tons of hip-hop, I do try to keep up with the genre’s more interesting releases, both the commercial and the more experimental stuff. So when Shabazz Palace – an outfit I’d never heard of – started popping up on all the “Best of” lists of 2011, I decided to check out Black Up  late last year. It certainly falls on the experimental end of the spectrum. Disjointed rhythms, odd and spooky production, otherworldly lyrics – it’s the kind of hip-hop album that demands close listening to unpack all its pleasures. And it’s most definitely not a disc one throws on to get the party started (well, I guess it depends on the kind of party).

This track is one of the album’s more accessible. In part because it’s a type of love song and in part because it’s rhythmic cadences are less angular or oddly contrapuntal. The rap pretty much flows straight forward from beginning to end and does so in close unison with the song’s beat. It’s not my favorite song on the album, but it is the first song that grabbed me – perhaps because it is “easier” than a lot of the other tracks. I really like the way the lyrics start out describing what seems essentially to be a crush (“I was hopin’ that maybe / I could be her baby”) and develop into something closer to full-on sexual obsession (“I want to be there / I should be in there”). And as the lyrics take on a different tonal shading, the production slowly builds the ambient background sounds into something more insistent.

 

Lew: I have to admit that I wasn’t familiar with Shabazz Palaces before getting this from you. I’m glad to have found out, though – it’s very cool stuff. I guess one of the first things that grabbed me was the way this track is set up rhythmically. It opens with a pretty straightforward arpeggiator sequence that is playing the first three sixteenth notes of every beat and resting on the fourth (1-e-and, 2-e-and, etc). The drum loop, which is much more syncopated, is layered in against that sequence. However, as the track moved along, I noticed that more and more of the drum hits are being effected with a delay that’s set up to repeat in sixteenth notes, so that the beat is constantly subdivided in a very pulse-like way. It’s a cool way of building rhythmic intensity, while changing fairly little of the original idea, and it also sets syncopation in the vocal part into sharper relief. It was also interesting the way the vocal part seemed swim slightly in and out of focus.

The lyrics are very well done throughout the track. I didn’t get sexual obsession completely from the track, although that’s definitely a part of it. When he says “being your only baby is a place and I want to be there” I get the sense that in addition to the obvious sexual connotation of that section, there’s also a component of place, relating to where he is in the world – that being with her feels like “home,” or some similar, but less clumsily stated sentiment.