“Shine a Light,” the lead single from Seattle art-rapper Shabazz Palaces’ Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star and Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines double release, recently gained an unusual music video treatment. Directed by Neil Ferron, the black-and-white video features a celebratory teenage wedding in an American countryside. Rapper Ishmael Butler (a.k.a. Palaceer Lazaro) appears as a baby satyr with an adult human head, who is offered up as a sacrifice. Death comes via gravity and a large rock, which is ritually hurled onto him by the initially reluctant teenage couple. There is an unmistakable parallel to Shirley Jackson’s acclaimed 1948 short story The Lottery, but with an interracial setting, a decidedly jubilant atmosphere and a half-human, half-literal scapegoat.
The connection between this setting and the album’s concept - Butler plays Quazarz, a “sent sentient from some elsewhere” who travels through “Amurderca” on the “Gangster Star” to “chronicle and explore as a musical emissary” - is not immediately apparent. The song’s chorus (Shine a light on the fake/ This way my peeps can have it all) nevertheless echoes the band’s stated commitment to hip hop’s primary mantra of ‘keeping it real’. When one manages to avoid “ the fleeting and the superficial nonessential”, one approaches the heavenly, transcendental and reassuringly familiar blend of funk, jazz and hip hop.
There is, of course, some social commentary in the form of a rap verse. Butler couches his political perspective on the dysfunctions of the hip hop scene and a starkly racialized America (“a cutthroat place, a landscape where someone like him could never quite feel comfortable amidst all the brutality and alternative facts and death masquerading as connectivity”) in high poetics. He elegantly weaves in a critique of capitalism and self-effacement, nonchalantly describing a climate of malaise that ends with an apocalyptic reference to the Black Lives Matter movement:
'Street profit, sweets geeked off it
Seek profit, cook styles eat off it
Think unique, tires squeak, jewels blink
Defy critique, high peaks, comped suites
She said I'm too deep, then she fell asleep
How that llama repeat sound hella sweet
Gorgeous dashing
Waves crashing, mind elastics
Smooth action
The Cadillacs was backed in (Why?)
You may need to get in the trunk or in the wind (Fast)
Lost friends, floss for them gloss gems
Often it's thought that I'm lost in
Weighing out what all this chance takings costing
Sliding cornered by more law enforcements
Feeling like I'm ridin' with The Four Horsemen'
Lyrics: Genius
The speed and ease in which Butler breezes through this rap verse allows these critical thoughts to readily go in one ear and come out through the other. All the better to bask in the promise of spiritual and physical redemption (which must surely be what ‘having it all’ means) wholly characterizes the song’s vaguely otherworldly production.
