It calls itself hip hop, but the moniker is archaic, corroded, broken. Just like Lese Majesty itself, a anglicized, bastardized (dare we even say appropriated? colonized?) interpretation of Lèse-majesté, an affront against the ruling class. And in this corrosion, this offense, we find the most undisputed tenants of hip hop rent to shreds.
Ishmael Butler, who once upon a time was the storm and the fury behind Digable Planets, has since been integrated deep into the matrix—or whatever ubiquitous equivalent we’ve settled on in this century. His poetry here is newly bizarre and alien, layered under reverb and buried underneath the production. The word we’re looking for, the modality, is absolute otherness, complete separation from the world around. If Black Up, the still stellar Shabazz Palaces debut, was a populated solar system that revolved around Butler’s burning sun, then this is his art launched into deep space, frozen solid to the point of ego death as the final stage of lonely individuation in an otherwise oppressive and homogenous culture.
Or, to use a less cloying analogy, it’s the 2001: A Space Odyssey to Janelle Monáe’s bubblegum apocalypse. It’s an impressionists’ afrocyberpunk Armageddon, now less a showcase for Butler’s politics and more an embrace of their general sentiments, mumbled like hieroglyphics read aloud and layered over and over again until only the feelings remain, even if the meaning is long lost. But the power remains, reborn through Tendai Maraire’s snaking production. It’s wordless hip hop for a wordless generation, grounded by comforting but senseless non-sequitors like “I don’t eat pork like Mr. Roarke/I’m coming up like Donald Duck” but launched through the stratosphere by the awe-inspiring synths shining through “Harem Aria,” or the shimmering guitar that warbles through “Noetic Noiromantics” or even the abrasively beautiful electronics that wash over “Sonic MythMap for the Trip Back” as the track and the record slowly fade to black. Maybe this isn’t even hip hop at all; maybe it’s just a spit in the face of kings, vandalizing everything they ever loved because it’s all oxidized and decayed anyways. Maybe it’s finally time for the future—and if we had to pick a blueprint for an artistic regime free of the tyranny of the majority, Lese Majesty might just be it.
Lese Majesty