For more than three decades, Ishmael Butler has treated hip-hop as a genre still in the process of becoming itself. As a member of Digable Planets, he helped slip jazz-cool abstraction onto the pop charts with 1992’s “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).” As the face of Shabazz Palaces, Butler was less frontman than another strange texture passing through the splintering beats and grooves of albums like 2024’s Exotic Birds of Prey.

Shabazz Palaces’s follow-up, It’s a Style Sport, puts Butler more at the forefront. Recorded over eight days with players who’ve worked with Butler for years, the album boasts an unexpectedly loose, live feel. Butler has framed it as a return to rap’s competitive spirit, and the songs are often direct and even funny.

Opener “Ahh World (I Won the Alpha Bet)” makes Butler’s newfound directness quite literal. Over a regal, bass-heavy throb, he narrates his birth like scripture before distilling his life into maxims—“Only shooters score”—and looking for the difference between having a code and merely looking like you do. On “Field Notes,” he shifts his focus to a young man chasing money and street cred until his life starts resembling “all the rap songs” he’s internalized, while “Show Me Missouri in Mink” takes stock of Butler in his own youth: “You could tell me anything/You’ve got to show me what you mean.”

The biggest surprise here is how much fun Butler seems to have when making fun of himself. “Jheri Curl Jump” lets him play the smooth operator while repeatedly undercutting his own game. He boasts about jet-setting through Paris and Rome, compares his date to a red velvet cupcake, and then declares, “Yeah, I had a lot of mangoes, but you sweeter.” He gets even sillier on “Tongue in Chic,” recounting a date with a self-proclaimed chef whose fridge is empty and whose cooking somehow ends with death threats and a hospital visit.

Occasionally, Butler’s lessons can sound like lectures. “Deadstock Dude,” “H.I.M.,” and “Money Can’t Save Your Mind” keep coming back to the same message about originality and buying the illusion of taste and experience. Set in “planet Brooklyn” circa 1993, the latter also catches Butler at his pettiest, lobbing sneers at someone who clearly shares his history: “I wrote rhymes, you learned them/All your bridges burned them/Followers was purchased.” What good is a code of character when an old grudge is enough to break it?

Closing track “From One Future to Another” thankfully downshifts Butler’s overabundance of swagger to something more vulnerable. Upright bass and brushed cymbals swell into a fuzzy, Stereolab-tinged haze as Butler, singing in falsetto, asks, “Must we be beautiful to win?” All that talk of winning ends up somewhere much smaller, with a maturing man considering what time keeps taking from him. For all of Butler’s self-mythologizing and bravado, that’s where he sounds most like himself.