Shabazz Palaces, the experimental Seattle rap project of Palaceer Lazaro (aka Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler) and Tendai (“Baba”) Maraire, has flourished due to a free-flowing ethos allowing openings for old sounds to seep in and new ones to escape and take new shape, adding a sense of psychedelic darkness to the earthy, jazz-inspired aesthetic of Lazaro’s 1990s group Digable Planets. Following 2011's Black Up, vocal collaborators THEESatisfaction spun Shabazz Palaces' subterranean feel into their 2012 debut awE naturalE, while Maraire released a solo album expanding on the traditional Zimbabwean music he’d brought to the collaboration. Each project has resembled a distinct piece of art, but when considered together, they represent a group of musicians with a connected set of sensibilities.
The latest project to spin off from this collective is Chimurenga Renaissance, an act helmed by Maraire alongside Hussein Kalonji and a crew of guests, including Lazaro. As he did on his solo album, Maraire finds another opening in Shabazz Palaces' porous template and reaches through it—this time, to his own father Dumisani Maraire, who's credited with bringing Zimbabwean music (specifically, the wind chime-like flutter of an instrument called the mbira) to Seattle in the 1960s. That marimba-adjacent sound, which breathed air and light into some of Shabazz Palaces’ dense arrangements, takes center stage on riZe vadZimu riZe, and highlights the connection between Tendai Maraire’s father and the work he does today.
But if riZe vadZimu riZe is an ethnomusicological lesson, it’s a light one, as the album filters traditional Zimbabwean music through Maraire’s contemporary hip-hop lens in a way that should feel accessible to anyone with an interest in experimental-leaning rap. Maraire approaches rapping more directly than Lazaro, layering his verses bluntly on top of the psychedelic sprawl of his instrumentation rather than weaving himself through it. He’s also more explicitly political, handling talking points in a way that feels reminiscent of Digable Planets’ first two albums, but with a somberness that places him more in line with someone like Talib Kweli. Maraire speaks to Zimbabwe’s history (“chimurenga” translates to “struggle”), but this is classic message rap that spans regionality—music that shuns crooked cops, fancy sneakers, Mercedes Benzes, Islamophobia, fake romances, corporate sponsorships, the media, the system.
Those themes have often bubbled to the surface on Shabazz Palaces albums, but they’re heavy-handed to the point of cartoonishness at times on riZe vadZimu riZe: “Just look at what success is/ Diamond kicks and Benzes,” Maraire raps, indignant on “The Race for Cush Naptha”. “Spending money you don’t have/ Just so you can fit in.” Sometimes, he resembles a public service announcement: “There’s consequences to what you do/ When the cops get crooked the goons will shoot,” he preaches on “It’s Bigger Than You”. On that same song, Lazaro comes off like a snarling class clown by comparison: “You struck it rich but that don’t mean that your bitch-ass ain’t corny,” he adds. “You know some killers, hustlers, strippers/ Nigga, who don’t?” Maraire, luckily, knows how to buffer the preachiness of his rapping with playful instrumentation, a habit that's made Shabazz Palaces so uniquely enticing. When his message starts to feel oppressive, the sound of the mriba takes some of the pressure off—and we can thank his father for that.
