Digable Planets and the Future of Hip-Hop

Remembering what hip-hop once was, and wondering what’s next

Essence of Cool

Downtown Tulsa fades into a Sunday hush. Evening sinks into technicolor sky. Under the concrete lip of I-244, fashionable adults weave between the squandered creep of traffic in expensive T-shirts and star-pointed boots.

They line up outside Cain’s Ballroom, Tulsa’s historic dancehall—longtime home of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and one of the rare American stages to host the Sex Pistols on their disastrous U.S. tour in 1978. (Sid Vicious famously punched a hole in the wall outside the women’s bathroom.)

Tonight, jazz-hip-hop trio Digable Planets takes the stage, just over 30 years after winning their only Grammy.

Inside, indigo light pulses as Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler prowls the stage, mirrored spaceman shades flashing, leather JNCOs dragging behind him. His smooth vibrato grabs the room — pleasantly breakneck. Memorized glances, refined through years of performance, sweep across the crowd.

On the other side, Craig “Doodlebug” Irving leans into the glow, hat cocked like a 1920s Irish mobster. Between them, Mariana “Ladybug Mecca” Vieira sways in a black-and-red Lauren Halsey tee.

Thirty minutes in, the jazzy stomp has gripped us. Then Butler drops a line that sums it all up: “Lyrics so fat you might gain weight.”

The room sinks into it. Heads nod without trying.

Digable Planets has always delivered this kind of nonchalance—cool without effort, political without permission, radical without noise. Now in their 50s, they should be less cool than ever. But they’re not. Digable has always been revolutionary — if and when they felt like it. Because coolness, real coolness, is subversive. And rare. It's been smoothed out, optimized, commodified to death. Yet here it is, in the purple glow of Cain’s, pulsing.