I\'ll say this about last night\'s Shabazz Palaces performance at Mad Planet: I\'ve never experienced a rap show that made such a mockery of ear plugs before. The avant hip-hop duo\'s deep, blown-out bass was pushed punishingly high in the mix, and somehow ear plugs only exacerbated the pain, conducting each brain-concussing bass throb and channeling it straight into my traumatized ear canal. This was a show that literally hurt. I can\'t write a formal review of the concert, since I eventually deferred to my headache and ducked out halfway through the set, but I want to quickly weigh in on what I did see, if only because it was so much worse than what I anticipated. <br /><br />I never connected with the shapeless, consciously cryptic songs on Shabazz Palaces\' 2011 full-length<em> Black Up</em>, but I couldn\'t help but admire that album\'s gleeful disregard for formalist hip-hop. At a time when most alternative hip-hop acts still slavishly cling to \'90s ideals, Shabazz Palaces looked to the present, contorting the barren, bass-dense beats of modern swag rap into digressive, psychedelic art-rap. There was something taboo about it. “Serious” rap acts weren\'t supposed to use sounds this heavy, this dirtyor frankly this contemporary. <em>Black-Up</em> was a high-brow Soulja Boy record for audiences who wouldn\'t be caught dead listening to Soulja Boy. <br /><br />Last night\'s show suggested that there\'s a lot of insecurity at the root of Shabazz Palaces\' daringness. The group strives to be loud and mysterious because its leader is anything but: He\'s Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler, the librarian-voiced softie from Digable Planets, rhyming in the same unmistakable gumdrop flow of his jazz-rap days. Butler went to great pains to disguise his identity early in Shabazz Palaces\' runrefusing interviews and even wearing a mask on stage, as if being a founder of one of the \'90s great rap acts was something to be ashamed ofand last night he still seemed to be compensating for his past, rapping over brutal bass implosions designed to destroy all memories of “Cool Like That.” The sheer heaviness of it all might have been exhilarating if if the songs themselves hadn\'t bled together into such an aimless, clumsy mess. Butler and percussionist/effects man Tendai Maraire conjured some gruelingly dense sounds, seemingly for the sole purpose of demonstrating that they could. They made their point, but there certainly wasn\'t anything artful about it.<br /><br />
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