Das Racist: Conscious hip-hop with a sense of humor
theGRIO REPORT - Ethnically, they represent cultures not often associated with rap music, although they hold some of the same anti-establishment values known in hip-hop...
For some hip-hop fans, groups like Das Racist are the perfect mix of intelligence and multicultural cool. If you’re a hip-hop fan who listens to mainstream radio, you may have heard one or two of their tongue-in-cheek tracks, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” or “Michael Jackson”. The latter track rounds out the beginning of their debut album, Relax, which drops today.
Given their name, which sounds like “that’s racist”, the New York-based group hovers in the sphere of conscious rap, although their lyrics — often jokingly political and introspective, but mainly party-style danceable rap — might make you think otherwise. Ethnically, they represent cultures not often associated with rap music, although they hold some of the same anti-establishment values known in hip-hop.
“For me, they represent the first real strong showing by an Indian-American rapper (Heems), who represents Queens and NYC hip-hop real hard,” says Boston-based music scholar and blogger, Wayne Marshall of the website Wayneandwax.com. “The group’s take on race — as self-proclaimed “brown” guys — is really quite nuanced, sophisticated, and best of all, funny,” he says.
Serious publications like The New Yorker and The New York Times, along with hip music blogs like Pitchfork and 2DopeBoyz have supported the group’s music. The trio is made up two Indian-American New Yorkers (rapper Himanshu Suri, aka Heems and hype-man Ashok Kondabolu, aka Dap), and an Afro-Cuban and Italian MC from the west coast (Victor Vazquez, aka Kool A.D.).
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They get pegged as controversial mostly for their name, but also for interviews in which they antagonize their audience and interviewers alike. There’s a Tumblr blog dedicated to everything about them available on the Internet. In one recent write-up for indie cool magazine The Fader they recommend books like Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
Das Racist has been on the rise since at least 2008 their intelligence isn’t always on the surface of their music, but digging in deep, you can hear that these are rappers who are conscious, but with a huge sense of humor. “They are absolutely vigilant observers of how race still matters for people of color of all stripes (ie, black, brown, etc), says Marshall. “It’s a little hard to encapsulate, but their humor is a huge part of this. Take the line ‘White people, play this for your black friends
black people, smack them..’
Marshall says their two free mixtapes, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man were mainstays on his iPod. “They do struggle with how to make their way in such a binary (i.e., white & black) system (i.e., hip-hop and the USA), ” he says.
Los Angeles music journalist and blogger Jeff Weiss says this brand of hip-hop isn’t something new.
“There is precedent for dudes like this — dudes like J-Zone, Open Mike Eagle, Prince Paul/Handsome Boy Modeling School,” he says. “As Immortal Technique has proven, white teenagers like nothing more than to allay their guilt by being told that they are the problem,” he says.
One of the paradoxes of Das Racist is that their overall style and persona is lost on hardcore hip-hop fans and they are distanced from the popularity of Lil’ Wayne and Jay-Z, though they have shared stage time with rappers like Snoop Dogg.
“Das Racist are uniquely aware of this paradox, they have read enough criticism to know how to subvert it. It’s not really fair, but it’s smart, and that’s sort of where they fall,” adds Weiss. He doesn’t consider the group to be a purely conscious rap act, either, and the group itself would probably agree. “The conscious rapper died the day that The Roots played with Jay-Z,” he says.
Whether conscious or not, the political nature of Das Racist isn’t lost on anyone, and neither are their fun rhymes and cult-like fan base. They sold out shows in New York City and are embarking on a nationwide tour to promote Relax. If their music does one thing, its getting people to talk about them, which in reality, is the goal of anyone spitting into a microphone.
