They came, won, won again, separated and drifted into solo projects, reunited a decade later and split before the reunion took off, just to reunite again. Or is it? The story of one of the greatest and most influential Hip Hop combos of all time.
9th wonder (Blackotism)
Black Ego
The biggest challenge for any artist is probably fame and its inevitable companions: money, envy, and criticism. Whether you are a writer, painter, a musician or even a sportsman – once you are widely recognized and dragged out in the sunlight of appreciation and applause, your life, and perhaps your art, is about to change big time. The German writer Günter Grass once briefed a new shooting star of German literature with the merciful sentence: “Now the time begins when everyone knows your life much better than you do yourself.”
Some people can cope with their new life and public identity, some cant. Some launch a successful career and some fall back into the unmediacovered “darkness” because they cant handle the changes. Some progress and develop, some simply fail. At the beginning of the 90s, a young Hip Hop combo named Digable Planets produced a platin album and a gold single, trophied a Grammy and released yet another album in the following year, “The Blowout Comb” – one of the best albums of that time.
Dog it
Craig Irving once said: “Hip Hop is a microcosm of what is happening in life.”
According to the love for metaphors, the tiniest worlds and insects, he took the name Doodlebug; his fellow MCs Ishmael Butler and Mary Ann Vieira, who all met in College and later gathered in Brooklyn, also turned into their alter egos Butterfly and Ladybug. Together they released their first record in 1993 on pendulum records, named “Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space)” One can judge by the name that we are not dealing with the usual Hip Hop language and dogmatism, and Digable Planets were all but usual. They were digging Jazz and mastering the spoken word, demonstrating the organic evolution from one spectrum into the other, from Jazz to Hip Hop, from soul into a new chapter of soul – a fusion of both that can easily be compared with the early Roots work such as Organix and Do you want more?!!!?. No bitch, no Motherfucker, no big words for little nothingness: Intelligent, laid-back rhymes and poetry covered the album in elegant beauty that was new to the world of rap these days and created a new merging sound of the two brothers who go so well together, the sax and the mic.
Graffiti
The echo in the community was immense. These smooth MCs obviously know the music of their fathers and grandfathers, they quote Karl Marx, sample from Art Blakey, respect Charlie Mingus and ease into an experimental sound like they have never enterprised in anything else in their life. Butterfly’s distinctive flow and tempo is one of that voices you never forget if you once got familiar with it. It fits the sound of Jazz like Jay-Z fits into his Jay-Z Sneakers. Doodlebug worst feature is that he looks like Rakim, and the lovely Ladybug got her respect by being a woman of soul and class rather than bitching around in front of the audience. Hence, the Album went great, the first single “Rebirth of slick (cool like that)” became a billboard hit. A review in the Rolling Stone read: “Artistically sound, unabashedly conscious and downright cool.”
Pleased by themselves and the critics, the Planets went on Tour. Not only MCs and a DJ crowded the stage, but bassists, drums, horns – one is well aware that we are not dealing with Rapper here, but with serious musicians. On their return to New York they hit the studio. The best thing was yet to come. A new album that was as good as its predecessor. The Blowout Comb.
The new album is not selling as good as “Reachin”, but the Planets manage to perform as stylish and confident as ever – a difficult task after the hype of the previous year, and that is why the Blowout Comb is the more important and the better album.
Black Ego, Dog it, Graffiti (featuring Jeru the Damaja), 9th Wonder (featuring DJ Jazzy Joyce) and Borough Check (featuring GURU) turned out to be loved even by people who are not particularly fans of Hip Hop music. I remember a friend of mine who actually discovered Jazz and jazz-orientated Hip Hop just because I played the Blowout Comb over and over again. He is now the one who is providing me with his newest Jazz discoveries.
Where I´m from
What happened next was tragic for everyone who had fallen in love with that unique threesome. Money, fame and stress finally kicked in and infected their relationship. Doodlebug once said: “Humans are supposed to be the most intelligent beings on the planet, and yet we can’t seem to come together in a peaceful manner.” After their second album, the peaceful manner also ended in between the three musicians. They were tired, exhausted, and felt like different people. Butterfly remembers: “We were really into music back then. But then, fame, the industry and hecticness took its toll.” And Doodlebug added: “The industry does everything to try and make you other than yourself.”
Thus, the classic break up due to “creative differences“.
The reunion is on 10 years later. In 2005, Digable Planets release a compilation album on Blue Note, “Beyond the spectrum: The Creamy Spy Chronicles”, but from here on things are pretty mixed up. The actual album is not happening, but they went on tour again, separate once more just to re-reunited without Ladybug in 2009. It seems that not even the artists themselves know what is going on, and neither do we. From the outside it seems everyone is content doing his or her solo projects. Butterfly is performing outstandingly as Shabazz Palaces (which for me is very close to the genius of the Planet’s albums – check the sidebar song!) and Cherrywine, Doodlebug is known as Cee Knowledge and is funking with the Cosmic Funk Orchestra, and Ladybug metaphored further into the perhaps more spirituel Ladybug Mecca. It is up in the stars if these three ever find a common path back to the studio or into a tourbus, but lets keep fingers crossed. All hope is not lost, and the future shall remain, as always, a mystery.
