Ishmael Butler has been one of rap’s most thoughtful and committed experimentalists since the early ’90s, first with Digable Planets (“Rebirth of Slick [Cool Like Dat]”—you know the track) and later as Shabazz Palaces. Produced with fellow Seattleite Erik Blood, It’s a Style Sport is one of the leanest, chilliest albums he’s made yet. It’s a Style Sport connects the dots between ’80s electro and 2000s Neptunes (“Jheri Curl Jump,” “Heliocentric Immortality Manifesto H.I.M.”) and The Delfonics and Sun Ra (“Show Me Missouri in Mink”), creating a sense of intergenerational continuity that speaks Black power without ever having to say it. The glue is Butler’s delivery, which has the unsettling, free-associated quality of a guy receiving transmissions from a distant star. Afrofuturism lives; Butler is proof.