Das Racist

MTV World has selected Das Racist as one of their top 25 new bands in the world! - MTV IGGY

When you first heard "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", did you wonder what a full-length Das Racist album would sound like? Did you even think they were capable of an album at all? Maybe you expected a whole mixtape filled with bewildered yelling about name brands on some postmodern Fatboy Slim shit, or one of those hipster-rap records filled with a bunch of half-serious post-crunk/booty bass homages. But if you were a bit more curious, maybe you went to their MySpace page and heard the elaborate reference-fest "Rainbow in the Dark" and a deconstruction of co-opted dancehall dialect called "Fake Patois" and caught on to something deeper. Maybe you started wondering if they were a bit less trivial than you suspected.

As it turns out, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" has as much to do with the whole of Shut Up, Dude as the Beastie Boys' "Cooky Puss" does to the referential overload of Paul's Boutique. Das Racist's Brooklyn-buzz affiliations and humorous bent might mislead you into thinking it's an exercise in cheap laffs for people who don't take rap seriously, but this album feels a lot more like the irreverent hip-hop fanboy mania of ego trip magazine than smarmy genre tourism.

Himanshu Kumar Suri aka "Heems" and Victor Vazquez have something elaborate going on, toying with and subverting the rules of hip-hop lyricism even as they pay them respect. "Who's That? Brooown!" uses A Tribe Called Quest's well-worn "Scenario" as a reference point, but Heems mutters his callbacks to Busta Rhymes' verse in a sleepily cocky voice that sounds like the exact opposite of Busta's off-the-charts energy. The repetition and recursiveness that made "Combination" so polarizing crop up in odd places; one otherwise-complex line in "Ek Shaneesh" simply ends "drinkin' beer, drinkin' beer/ prolly drinkin' some more beer" before teasing an obvious Tears for Fears-referencing internal rhyme that never actually comes. Familiar hit-sourced hooks are self-sabotaged with trailed-off mumbling (the Juelz Santana-sourced, Billy Joel-jacking "You Oughta Know"), the spiritual presence of Bob Marley is called into the not-so-lofty service of soundtracking their tribute to dollar cans of iced tea, and they actually named one of their tracks "Deep Ass Shit (You'll Get It When You're High)" as a rib-jabbing mission statement. (No points in guessing which prolific Oxnard-based underground producer gets his beat used for that one.)

If they were just fucking around, those gags would wear off and leave you with nothing but a series of smug hey-get-it? nudges. But Heems and Victor are serious enough about coming up with memorable lines that they come across like some kind of lyrical stealth operatives. The fact that they often go from water-treading repetition to intricately built phraseology mid-verse is a great riff in itself. One of the shortest and simplest lines on the album is one of the cleverest-- "W.E.B. DuBois/ We be da boys," from "Hugo Chavez"-- but there are also moments where you're left wondering how they could make so many unexpected linguistic connections look so easy. Their go-hard rampage on "Nutmeg" is 1990s-reared, cipher-honed style gone berserk, turning a funhouse mirror on Ghostface's finest moment of abstract pyrotechnics, as it starts with the unlikely couplet "Queens Boulevard/ Kierkegaard" and gets even more dizzyingly ridiculous from there.

Granted, there's a certain information-overload college-student bent to their humor, evident in cross-genre namedrops like "Richard Hell Rell" or the mentions of Tao Lin and "and Dinesh DiSouza. But Das Racist push past mere signifying to come across as straight-up literates with a way of making cultural studies out of entertainment and vice-versa. Several lyrics take offhand references to Bollywood stars and Cuban sandwiches and extrapolate stream-of-consciousness ethnographies out of them, while "Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)" draws out punchlines and commentary about identification by listing all the racially divergent celebrities that women supposedly claim Victor and Heems resemble (Egyptian Lover; Amitabh Bachchan; Slash without his hat). Das Racist approach this idea of otherness in a way that feels both playful and provocative, asserting their identities in a way that both reinforces their individuality and goofs on their stereotypes. And if it hits a certain nerve, it's probably the same one that got tweaked by the sociological b-boy stoner comedy precedent of "Chappelle's Show". Fast-food hipster-rap, my ass-- these dudes are the truth.

— Nate Patrin, July 2, 2010
- Pitchfork.com

Tagged as "joke rap" after Perez Hilton stumbled onto their dada one-off "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," Brooklyn-based MC duo Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez are actually hyper-earnest tacticians, using hip-hop's language of identity politricks to sift through pop culture's perpetual spew. Rakim once mused, "You're the journal?/ I'm the journalist," and on this riotously referential, 17-track mixtape, Das Racist rap like reporters issuing Twittery soliloquies on whatever's melting in America's porta-potty, from Kierkegaard to Queens Boulevard and Dinesh D'Souza to Lollapalooza. - SPIN Magazine

During a news conference on Wednesday night, President Obama stood up for the prominent African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who had recently been arrested by a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., in an incident rife with racial tension.

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In a less publicized defense later that night at Union Pool in Brooklyn, the local art-rap group Das Racist offered a song to Mr. Gates, who famously testified on behalf of 2 Live Crew in a 1990 obscenity trial, locating that bawdy group’s performances in a long lineage of black oral traditions.

Mr. Gates, though, couldn’t have anticipated Das Racist, a pair of stoner jokesters: Himanshu Suri, whose parents emigrated from India, and Victor Vazquez, of Cuban and Italian heritage. But their sloppiness is a mask for detailed, affectionate hip-hop parody, name-dropping KRS-One and Asher Roth as easily as W. E. B. Du Bois and the literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Their act is a blend that inspires questions like this one in a recent interview in The Village Voice: “Is this a joke that everyone thinks is a graduate thesis, or vice versa?”

And this one, which Mr. Suri asked the tightly packed, largely white, artfully dressed and coifed crowd on Wednesday: “You guys like rap music at all?”

Both were fair questions. Das Racist formed at Wesleyan: if the Hoover administration promised a chicken in every pot, perhaps what the Obama era has to offer is a joke-rap ensemble at every liberal arts college. But Das Racist’s lack of piety has become an aesthetic of its own, with songs that are as much commentary on hip-hop as rigorous practice of it. (Its music is at myspace.com/dasracist.)

On “Hugo Chávez,” which the band skipped on Wednesday night, its Venn diagram of influence reads as such: “Listening to coke-rap, listening to joke-rap/Listening to ‘Donuts,’ listening to grown-ups/Listening to Camu, listening to Cam too.”

That’s Camu Tao, the indie rapper who died last year, and Cam’ron, perfecter of Harlem’s flamboyant polysyllabic thug-rap and the most direct antecedent of Das Racist’s style, even more so than hip-hop satirists like Plastic Little, J-Zone or the eccentric producer Prince Paul.

At Union Pool Das Racist was messy — sometimes appealingly so, sometimes agonizingly so. Mr. Vazquez and Mr. Suri spent as much time pinballing around the crowd as rapping onstage, and their drummer for the night abandoned ship after three songs, leaving his kit unprotected from the random poundings of Mr. Suri and Mr. Vazquez.

But there was unerring charm amid the mess, and a heaping buffet of references waiting to be unpacked for careful listeners, of which there were few here. “Shorty said I look like Devendra Banhart,” Mr. Vazquez rapped. “Shorty said I look like that dude from Japan’s art/You know, the dude that did the Kanye album cover/ Shorty said I look just like Egyptian Lover.”

Lately, Das Racist has become best known for one of its dimmest songs, the blog favorite “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” an entrancing but numbing track based largely on the repetition of the title phrase. It came at the end of the night. A half-hour earlier, Mr. Suri had asked if the crowd was ready to hear “the fast-food idiot song.” Or did he say “the fast-food idiom song”? Who could tell?

More Articles in Arts » - NY Times

The first time I met the Brooklyn rap duo known as Das Racist, we planned to go to a bar in Williamsburg—until Himanshu Suri, the jollier, more debauched half of the group, remembered he’d been barred from the premises for undisclosed drunken antics. A week later, we met again, at the same verboten bar: “It’s cool,” Suri said. “I worked it out.” We were inside for maybe 30 seconds before the bartender spotted him. “You’re the Das Racist guy, right? Get out.” Apparently he’d been back and misbehaved again. Which is what Das Racist does best. At a recent show, Suri and bandmate Victor Vazquez dressed in Cosby sweaters, got wasted on vodka-and-grapefruits and whiskey-and-cokes, and performed a faithful rendition of the Butthole Surfers’ “Pepper.” The Bushwick crowd ate it up.

Suri, 24, grew up in an Indian neighborhood in Queens called Glen Oaks; his mother sold insurance, his dad once drove a cab. He attended Stuyvesant High School, and was there the day the Twin Towers fell. Vazquez, 25, was raised in the Bay Area by a black Cuban father and an Italian mother. The pair met at Wesleyan (where they were buddies with the guys from MGMT) and bonded over a love of freestyling and their shared minority-outsider status. “Hima and I are two weird, socially awkward brown dudes,” says Vazquez, “and we deal with that awkwardness by taking drugs and telling jokes.”

Suri calls their approach “deconstructionalist”: sawing the legs out from under hip-hop as they celebrate it. The apotheosis of their sound is this summer’s underground hit “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Two minutes and 59 seconds long, it consists almost entirely of this refrain: “I’m at the Pizza Hut / I’m at the Taco Bell / I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”

The single has been celebrated as “Harold and Kumar existentialism” and denigrated as “probably the worst song in the world”; either way, it’s smarter than it first sounds. “We could have written a structured treatise attacking corporate proliferation,” says Vazquez. “Or we could just say ‘Pizza Hut Taco Bell’ over and over. That shit’s way funnier.”

Das Racist hope to record an album this fall; in the meantime, they’re staying busy getting high and dreaming up new ways to subvert themselves. For their next show, they’re contemplating a 45-minute jam session with no rapping. “And if it sucks,” says Suri, “hey, we still get free drink tickets.” - NY Magazine

Das Racist, the New York hip-hop duo who broke out last summer with their infectious child-rap 'Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,' opened their stint at SXSW 2010 by telling the crowd that they were not Nas or Damian Marley, who were special surprise guests at the Levi's Fader Fort across town.

Instead, they claimed to be the Cool Kids, then Vivian Girls, then Dum Dum Girls and then Vampire Weekend. No one seemed to buy it. Also mentioned was a bit of trouble they ran into with the venue's staff who apparently didn't let them inside for 20 minutes. Das Racist had only one explanation for this: "they're racist."

With all the joking -- or not joking -- aside, Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez churned out a energetic set that involved a fondness for picking up and twirling mic stands, picking up an twirling each other during rap segments and half wearing the clothes they first came on stage with. While it was hard to discern what exactly Das Racist was rapping about -- their .vocals are quick and this particular environment was a pool hall, so the sound was a bit muffled. Still, aside from dissing Carlos Mencia, the deep, repetitive bass grooves of 'Who's That Brown' had the crowd thumping along or considering the current state of race relations.

The irony of Das Racist, still, is that it's hard to figure out exactly how much irony they're projecting and how much is actual sincerity. But that's probably how they want it. After all, they did describe their sound as like "the wind on the Long Island shore at night" to us. - Spinner.com

The boys of hip-hop outfit Das Racist know how to keep things cool at a music festival. During their mid-afternoon performance on the Tent Stage -- which gave fans a shady reprieve from the sun -- Victor Vazquez (above, far right) wore his microphone cord wrapped around his neck like a noose, hype man Ashok "Dap" Kondabolu (left) shook like he was having a seizure onstage, and Himanshu Suri (second from right) threw strips of duct tape at the audience. Chugging beers and sometimes jumping into the crowd in front of them, the rap trio (and one DJ) spit lyrics like, "Shorty said I look like Osama, plus Obama, minus the drama," and generally poked fun at themselves and everyone around them ("We're the Roots!" they joked enthusiastically when they first walked onstage).
- SPIN Magazine

THROW YOUR HANDS UP: If you haven't caught the buzz about Brooklyn rap duo Das Racist, tonight is your chance to see what it's all about. The underground wonders hit the Evil Olive for a show hosted by BBU, a Chicago trio also making waves. With DJs Hollywood Holt and J2K of Flosstradamus also in the mix, rest assured this is gonna be a hot one. 10 p.m., 1551 W Division St, $5 (free before midnight)

Source: http://www.nbcchicago.com/around-town/events/Tonight-Das-Racist-99308149.html#ixzz0v0DEEJrr - NBC Chicago