Digable Planets: Back for a Blowout
Ahead of their debut at WOMADelaide, Grammy-winning trio Digable Planets reflect on their seminal second album Blowout Comb – a jazz-informed, hip hop record that remains a raw and unfiltered portrait of America’s socio-political landscape 30 years later.
Words by Zara Richards // Image Bruce Talamon
Image supplied
“It’s like a coming of age,” says Ishmael ‘Butterfly’ Butler of Grammy-winning hip hop collective Digable Planets when reflecting on their second album, Blowout Comb. It’s 3:44pm in Seattle when the rapper dials into a video call with The Note to talk about the 30th anniversary of the 1994 record – a project that cemented the trio as an incisive voice in American hip hop, unafraid to seal their hopes and fears for the future on wax.
As Digable Planets, Ishmael, Mariana ‘Ladybug Mecca’ Viera and Craig ‘Doodlebug’ Irving (who joins our interview moments later) capture the mood of a generation caught in the crossfire of their country’s cultural turbulence on Blowout Comb. This perspective shouldn’t have come as a surprise to listeners in 1994. The collective’s gold-certified debut album, Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space) – which featured Grammy Award-winning song ‘Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat)’ – arrived a year earlier and centres Afrofuturism, unity and peace. But where the first LP takes a philosophical look at freedom, namechecking schools of thought from Karl Marx and Albert Camus, Blowout Comb is pointed, communicating observations on politics, Black empowerment and liberation with a breezy honesty only young people who believe in a better future can possess.
“The first album is a lifetime of ideas and work,” Ishmael says. “The time between the first and second is much shorter and condensed. [You’re] honing your craft and creativity – you’re capable of expressing yourself more, fine-tuning [with] a little more specificness.
“In some ways, [on Reachin’], we felt misunderstood as some flower power type of stuff, but we really had more edge than what we felt was being represented. So we just wanted to solidify that [on Blowout Comb] – that was our goal in a lot of ways. A lot of shit was happening at the time that we wanted to speak to and show we had a position on.”
The backdrop to Blowout Comb was an increasingly polarised America. Discussions around systemic racism and police brutality were at the fore following the violent L.A.P.D. assault of Rodney King and the ensuing LA riots in 1992. The country’s tough-on-crime rhetoric had also created an environment that reinforced stereotypes and stoked the moral panic of ‘Black criminality’.
In turn, hip-hop became a way to respond to rife inequality and heightened racial tensions, with Digable Planets using intellectual, afro-centric rhymes to critique the socio-political landscape and incite change on a grassroots level. “We had been raised to speak about things we saw that were unjust,” says Ishmael when asked about the candour of Blowout Comb. The MC’s parents were civil rights activists; his father a historian in African American culture and professor at the University of Virginia. Likewise, Craig’s father was a member of the Marxist-Leninist Black Panther Party.
“All the music they listened to, all the things they were talking about… was about figuring a way to make life better for all our people. So, it was something we understood as a way of life – not necessarily that you had a choice to do it, but more like a choice in how you were going to do it. You could be an artist, a director, an activist, a coach, but you had to do something. Whatever you were into had to have an aspect of contributing to the struggle involved in it.”
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Blowout Comb is layered and subtle in its approach. Underneath the trio’s jazz tendencies, hypnotic samples and close-to-the-mic lo-fi performance, lines like “Find the spot in this land of Uncle Sam / Focus my thoughts and be that true Black man that I am / I stand in the face of oppression” on ‘Dial 7 (Axioms Of Creamy Spies)’ cut with accurate precision.
The album is also littered with references to Brooklyn and Fort Greene – the neighbourhood Digable Planets relocated to from Philadelphia in 93 that’s considered an incubator for jazz music, hip-hop and Black culture. See ‘Borough Check’, the trio’s love letter to the district, delivered in collaboration with the late rapper Guru of Gang Starr: “That’s just how we do it baby / Out here in Brooklyn baby / Slick move / Cause can’t nothing stop up but us / So we gettin’ ours baby / Nothin’ but Brooklyn baby.”
“I’m a big fan of Gang Starr,” says Ishmael when asked about Guru’s feature. “He came to the studio and did his part and we all were hanging out with him. That day was a memorable one – just being about to hang around somebody that was a hero to me. Working with Guru is a pinnacle from that time.”
“That was a good session right there,” adds Craig. “And [producer] Dave Darlington – he was a good guy. That was one of my first times being in a major studio, so I was just there, soaking up game, looking at these guys teaching us how to be professionals.
“Back then, It was less digital and more analogue. We were doing stuff on two-inch tapes – you had to cut the tape, edit it and splice it back together. It was crazy, but it was good to learn from such masters like that.”
Next month, Digable Planets head Down Under in celebration of Blowout Comb’s 30th anniversary, playing WOMADelaide on March 10. It’s a chance for the festival’s cross-generation, Australian-based audience to connect with a seminal work in America’s hip-hop legacy.
“We were able to speak on how we felt at that moment in time; we were able to speak on the issues in our own way. And I think that message was heard,” says Craig, reflecting on the impact of Blowout Comb. “I couldn’t imagine 30-odd years later doing this – sitting here, talking and looking back. But at the same time, I knew this was all I wanted to do.
“A lot of people will just scream into the wind and it doesn’t connect with anybody. We were lucky enough to have our own philosophy of life accepted by a great swathe of the population that gravitated towards it. I still feel that same fire and energy from those days. It’s still in me.”
See Digable Planets at WOMADelaide on March 10. Final release tickets available now via womadelaide.com.au.
