Das Racist

Since their arrival on the scene some three years ago, much blog hullaballoo has been made over Das Racist's post-ironic clusterfuck rap. But though the internet debates have raged, the wider hip-hop world has mostly shrugged; now that the group has delved into Diplo-fied club-a-dub-dub with its debut LP Relax, expect folks to start paying a little more attention.

I recently penned a feature on Das Racist for Creative Loafing in which I tried to parse the dudes' labyrinthine musical language.

There's a moment of quiet impact in a now-famous Dave Chappelle sketch about a "Leave it to Beaver"-esque family whose last name happens to be homophonous with a certain racial epithet. Clad in milkman-minstrel garb, Chappelle finally turns to the camera and utters a smiling SOS: "This racism is killing me inside."

Rappers Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri operate with less comedic masochism but with a similarly absurdist eye for racial politics, cloaking their observations in a stoned but studious tone that could rightly be deemed subversive. It's Chappellian-via-Wesleyan, less "Did he really just say that?" and more "Wait, what did he just say?" As Das Racist, the Brooklyn group self-released two stellar and much-blogged-about mixtapes in 2010, Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. On the surface, Das Racist consisted of a couple of wildly talented jokesters musing on dumb shit: junk food, rap culture, weed. Underneath, they were a couple of wildly talented jokesters with a penchant for profundity. "We are family," goes the deadpan chorus to "Puerto Rican Cousins," from Sit Down, Man. "At least that's what we look like we might be."

Read the rest here.

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