Shabazz Palaces & THEESatisfaction Present: "Black Up" (Kahlil Joseph Film-Sampler)
The rough blueprint for "Black Up" sounds pretty ambiguous on paper: De-constructed film version of Shabazz Palaces' critically acclaimed 2011 debut, Black Up... a fragmented stream of consciousness short film, all set to a score made up of segmented LP tracks. With that said, Kahlil Joseph's "Black Up" is truly a murky, concept-heavy affair, which co-stars Palaceer Lazaro & Tendai Naraire throughout. Joseph has proven to be a frequent collaborator of the Seattle-based Hip-Hop/Jazz Fusion artists.
Shabazz Palaces' featured scenes are inter-spliced against "artsy" frames, littered with [quick] images of plants, streetcars, pork chops, bodies in trees... a Gil Scott-Heron tribute, interpretive dancing, Hip-Hop clichés, and the ocean. I believe that the film's soundtrack features samplings of several Black Up cuts including: "free press," "recollections,"