Even gimmes are vulnerable to erasure. Take it from Seattle’s Ishmael Butler, the polemicist, art-rap honcho and reformed hoopster more commonly known as Butterfly.
Years before his rebirth as the face of Digable Planets — and more recently the hip hop group Shabazz Palaces — Butler played Division 1 basketball at UMass. This was the 1980s, when most took for granted the filthy post play and smothering physicality of the sport. It’s a physicality that today hardly exists, either at the collegiate level or in the NBA. Imagine if long-retired “role player” Charles Oakley, who was in essence the centerpiece of the Bulls’ defense in the late ‘80s, were active now, clawing madly for rebounds and loose balls. He would be marched in front of a basketball crimes tribunal.
The sanitization of hip hop has been less absolute. There are those like Butler who can’t be hushed, who won’t give in to the faceless technocracy, but some say a certain passivity has come to infect hip hop. In decades past you could count on a pointed and usually smart critique of systemic injustice. Nowadays that’s hard to find.
When it came to social critique, “hip hop took the reigns,” Butler says. “It wasn’t just Public Enemy or De La (Soul). Your average rapper had a cut on his album talking about Black power.” Morality, real mortality, was infectious among artists at the time.
Butler, a Marxist and Afrofuturist, wears those titles proudly. The son of an academic, he was raised on jazz and anti-colonial theory. At home, he said he absorbed such works as “The Wretched of the Earth,” Frantz Fanon’s dense and illustrious liberation tome. With off-hours reading material like that, school must have been a bit of a de-stressor for Butler, who played alto sax in his middle school jazz ensemble. Even then he was an incorrigible music nerd.
Given his background, his years of scholarship and his devotion to Black causes, Butler is an admitted malcontent. He’s dismayed, even hurt, by what he sees as the triad enveloping hip hop: apathy, inaction and self-glorification.
“I do think it’s possible for hip hop to be uncorrupted, de-corrupted,” Butler says. “But if hip hop won’t even respect its own past, what can we expect?”
Put another way, this is not the same genre that stole his heart so many years ago, when he was just an eager and suggestible teenager, tinkering happily with his friend’s Alesis drum machine.
After high school, he attended UMass-Amherst until the invisible rap gods beckoned him to New York City and he dropped out, closing the door on his hoops career. No matter! Butler found work at Sleeping Bag Records, a scrappy independent label, “running errands” and “soaking up game” from legends like EPMD, Stezo and the forgotten Just-Ice. Butler couldn’t have asked for a better education. Also, he met his artistic soul mates: Mariana “Ladybug Mecca” Viera, a sultry, self-composed everygirl, and Craig “Doodlebug” Irving, a dispassionate B-boy with a surplus of “downtown flavor.”
Digable Planet’s first two albums bring the ruckus. It’s a musical ruckus of the sort you would expect from jazz man Butler: immaculate drum breaks, beatific orchestral flourishes and exotic curveballs aplenty. But these albums do not mince words, especially when it comes to the moral vandalism of trickle-down economics.
Some consider Digable Planets “one-hit wonders,” but that’s not how Butler keeps score; he is meticulously album-oriented. There is no question, however, that “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat),” with its gliding horn riff and indomitable bass line, will forever reign as the definitive Digable record. That suits Butler just fine.
“I never get tired of performing it,” Butler says, grinning widely. “I never wish it hadn’t happened. There are other joints I’ve made that are maybe more skillful, but as a complete idea, ‘Rebirth’ is the pinnacle of Digable. And that’s reflected in its popularity.”
In many ways, this Afrofuturist is the very picture of modernity; his son, in fact, is Lil Tracy, the ever-colorful and piquantly youthful SoundCloud sensation. (Father and son have a track together on “Exotic Birds of Prey,” Butler’s new album, due out in March.) Yet Butler does not own a cellphone. He maintains that his off-the-grid lifestyle, while superficially inconvenient, lends itself to enhanced creativity.
“It’s almost like having a brick tied to you,” Butler says. “Always having a device on you — there are levels of access, expectations of access, that I’m just not comfortable with.”
Despite his misgivings, he certainly looks happy. Speaking from home in Seattle, the 54-year-old is charming, agreeable and put-together, with a quick and easy smile. He’s just, well, cool like that.
Digable Planets Reachin’ 30th Anniversary Tour, with Kassa Overall, 8 p.m. Jan. 26 at Thalia Hall, 1807 S. Allport St.; thaliahallchicago.com
M.T. Richards is a freelance writer.