The Brag

Das Racist
They’re Not Joking. Just Joking.
By Matt Roden

If it’s sometimes hard to continue reading the same responses from music artists – “We recorded in a cabin”; “We were influenced by Springsteen”; “We’re just gonna play it one game at a time” – then it must be just as tiring to be asked over and over about the origins of your inspiration. Heems, one third of the Brooklyn-based hip hop group Das Racist, also sounds tired, but the questioned areas of expertise that have been thrust upon him and his band mates must tax in ways that extend beyond repetition.

Das Racist (say it quick and lazy), from New York circa only about two years ago, have released two mixtapes (Sit Down, Man; Shut Up, Dude) and one album (last year’s Relax) and toured pretty solidly, and yet most interviews will skip blithely past the making of their music to the myriad of topics the band espouses on – and then generally, reliably, inevitably come back to race.

“We came out with a song like ‘Pizza Hut Taco Bell’, and everyone was scratching their heads,” says Heems, breaking from a rehearsal in New York to be interviewed about the interviews they give, and to be asked why they sometimes seem to not get asked about their music at all. “And then the story is we’re neither black nor white, but our big picture is kind of black and white, and looks brown. And in America, at least, there aren’t a lot of brown people or Indian people visible in the arts. Then there’s the fact that two of us are college educated and went to a liberal arts school. Or, I don’t know – people are pretty small-minded.”

Jumping from novelty song to international literary festival (more on this later) in 26 odd months is a strange and vaulting path; many moons after ‘Who Let The Dogs Out’, we are still yet to see the Baha Men share the stage with David Sedaris. But even though their perplexing break-out jam ‘Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell’ may have been smarter than it initially seemed (“We could have written a structured treatise attacking corporate proliferation,” Victor Vazquez, aka Kool A.D., explained in the early media melange over the internet hit. “Or we could just say ‘Pizza Hut Taco Bell’ over and over. That shit’s way funnier.”), their leap from YouTube boobs to culture critics and minority spokespeople has been as hastened by themselves as it has their press.

With home-grown haircuts and second-hand-shopped rave tops, Das Racist would probably have been the sore thumb in the indie hip hop world even without the finger-pointing name – let alone the culturally-diverse lineup (a range of Cuban and South Asian bi-racial backgrounds between the three members), let alone that their lyrics overtly address this, and the novelty of this, and the perhaps racism in this novelty (see ‘All Brown Everything’, ‘Fake Patois’, ‘Puerto Rican Cousins’), let alone that much of this addressing is done through a haze of weed jokes and txt msg-rdy jests (“White people love me like they love Subarus/Rolling with the super crew, something like Scooby-Doo/My eyes droopy? Mommy that’s what doobies do.” from ‘Rapping 2 U’), let alone that the jokes are actually funny (“We’re not racist, we love white people! Ford trucks, apple pies! Bald eagles / Yeah, Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, Pringles, Kraft Singles, Slim Jims, Sierra Mist!” from ‘hahahaha jk?’). And so placing all this complicated, culturally-sensitive stuff in a laugh-out-loud party jam has probably opened up Das Racist to more questions from more directions than most musicians in a long time. “A lot of times, Indian kids will come to me on my blog from high school and college and – well, not even Indian kids – they’ll be like, ’I’m white… my mum is Spanish… my dad is African’. People just tell me what their identity is and ask a question, and I don’t know what to tell them,” Heems says. Recently, the internet-heavy presence of all members has led to a strong back and forth with the audience and, beyond the frequent offerings of pot at future gigs, most of the conversation hovers around race. “But it’s fascinating to see, and I guess they see me speaking for them, and that’s cool. I hope we’re doing a good job.”

“Doing it in our lyrics is just one way,” Heems continues, “and if we’re talking about it and people read about it in interviews, that to me is no different from me discussing it in our lyrics – or, if they see something in a visual thing we do, that’s no different from hearing it in a song. Music is just one part of what I see to be this whole multi-media project.”

In 2009, Das Racist played a gig that was a live recreation of Beastie Boys’ Ill Communication. Without the band having memorised the rhymes particularly well, reports were that it sort of bombed (just in terms of entertaining anyone outside the band). But a couple of international jaunts and a solid national tour on the back of their latest release have the group tightening their live act. “It’s not a planned chaos, and what happens between the songs, we just react to what happens on the day. We don’t have practised banter. And we’ve been putting together cool projections, playing with delay pedals; working on stuff to keep us from getting bored. There’s a lot of visuals that don’t correlate to the references in the lyrics, except maybe in one or two places – it’s more of a somewhat visual component to the chaotic nature of our music.”

All in, their multi-media project currently consists of Das Racist’s audio output, live visuals, internet filmed doco shorts, personal and band blogs and solo mixtapes (Kool A.D. and Heems have both released theirs this year; Dapwell, the third member and hypeman, is rumoured to be working on one too), as well as stewarding through the next bunch of whoever-they-find-interesting musicians through Heems’ label GreedHead. You can hear a few of them, including “this white Jewish kid from uptown” Lukatis and experimental pop act Keepaway, on Das Racist’s earlier mixtapes. And on top of that?

“I’m going to India to do a literary festival in Goa. I’m doing that as just kind of myself. I’ll be talking about Das Racist, then some of the stuff I do related to India – I’ve written articles about a TV show set in a call centre, and another about Osama Bin Laden and 9/11… But they’re basically bringing me out to sit on a panel and talk about rapping and poetry.” Which is just excellent co-curricular stuff for a weed-rap, joke-slinging, multi-racial, internet-soaked hip hop outfit to be doing. No wonder they get asked the tough questions.

What: Relax is out now
When: Hot Produce stage @ 4.30pm, Big Day Out
Sideshow: Oxford Art Factory on Wednesday January 25, with True Vibenation and Simo Soo