Nor did the members of Shabazz Palaces seem at all interested ininteracting with their audience. They sometimes twirled insynchronized motion, their movements as stiff and exacting as twowind-up figures in a music box. But they never stopped the music,never strayed from the laptop rig, and barely looked up to meet theeyes of audience members. And the crowd responded in kind, dancingstiffly to the long sequence of electronic beats and thenear-hypnotic sound of Butler murmuring into a microphone. Shabazz Palaces might seem like an odd fit for fans of My MorningJacket, even if its ties to the indie label Sub Pop make it a"crossover group" by definition.
While Digable Planets hadextremely wide appeal, Shabazz Palaces seems to occupy a muchnarrower sliver of the pop music spectrum. Butler veers frompolitical soliloquies ( I'm free/Shit, you know I'm free ) to empty reveries in which he repeats the same line over and overagain ( Who do you think who you are ? he chanted at Greek Theatre, to no one in particular). Thegroup's music, wedged somewhere between hip-hop and electronica,with nods to certain Seventies-era antecedents (Gil Scott Heroncomes to mind), doesn't provide a lot of meaty hooks or danceablebeats to latch onto. Butler spent much of his earlier careersampling Miles Davis horn lines and making intelligent music forthe masses.
Now 43 years old, he seems content to follow a newartistic muse, even if it aligns him with jam-band rock instead ofhip-hop. If rhythm-less dancing is an unfortunate byproduct, so beit. That said, when My Morning Jacket took the stage shortly after 9p.m., launching into a jaunty version of its new song "Circuital,"the disconnect seemed jarring -- even a die-hard advocate ofgenre cross-pollination might scratch his head and wonder whatkinds of conversations the two bands had backstage. The fivemembers of My Morning Jacket formed their outfit in 1998, but theyall seem like relics of the Seventies: long hair; cowboy boots;deep, bellowing vocals.
At this particular concert, singer JimJames took the stage wearing a cape, which gave him the air of a Lord of the Rings character. He and the other band members -- guitarist CarlBroemel, keyboardist Bo Koster, drummer Patrick Hallahan, andbassist "Two Tone Tommy" Blankenship -- seemed to have spawnedfrom an era when shaggy hair and woolly beards were all consideredcool. Today, they make unlikely sex symbols. But if the dancing seemed a little staid and tame for ShabazzPalaces, it ratcheted up a notch for My Morning Jacket, perhapsbecause the latter band invites such freewheeling movements. Folksytwo-part harmonies and blues-influenced rock chords are MorningJacket's stock in trade; most of its songs devolve into long,psychedelic vamps that drag out for ten minutes at a time.
TheGreek Theatre is certainly familiar to such long-winded jam-bandwankery, since it's hosted such groups as Phish, String CheeseIncident, and Phil Lesh and Friends many times before. Yet MyMorning Jacket might be the apotheosis: From the moment James shookout his luxuriant, wavy hair and Broemer shredded his first powerchord, the ghosts of Deadheads past were suddenly omnipresent. Fanswho had given Shabazz Palaces a lukewarm reception went all out forMy Morning Jacket, swaying their hips, dog-paddling the air, andsloshing their beers ecstatically. It was, emphatically, a jam-band crowd: well-dressed, well-heeled,possessing of blue wands and glow sticks and fragrant weed. Indeed,the whole scene seemed antithetical to Shabazz Palaces' futuristic,Afrocentric sensibility -- it's hard to believe a group thatcalled its first album Black Up would then deign to court a majority-white audience.
Then again,Butler has evidently outgrown the parochial domain of hip-hop. He'ssigned to a rock label now, his voice has coarsened, his"empowerment" rhetoric seems like a winking homage to theSeventies. Moreover, he produces music that defies all notions ofdanceability. It does, however, lend itself to bodies that shambleand stumble.
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