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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Reporting & Essays |
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Reportage |
Mic Check
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| An Indian-American rapper and his crew are making serious waves in the hip hop world. Is Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri for real? |
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Published : 1 October 2011 |
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HE FIRST TIME Das Racist ever performed ‘Michael Jackson’, the first single from their much-anticipated debut album Relax, was at Columbia University’s Bacchanal Spring Concert on 30 April earlier this year. The picturesque, grassy quadrangle in the centre of campus was packed with thousands of students and walk-in concertgoers from the |
grittier neighbourhoods beyond the university’s walls, and the Brooklyn-based trio was notching another step on their improbable journey toward rap credibility: opening up for the west coast rap legend Snoop Dogg.
I was standing stagefront when Das Racist’s Himanshu Suri (aka ‘Heems’) announced the song; a distinct hush of anticipation fell over the crowd. Within moments, the band exploded across the stage, frenetically yelling the song’s catchphrase into their mics: “Michael Jackson! One Million Dollars! You feel me? Holler!” Just one scant minute later, the audience had taken up the refrain, and the callback spread all the way to the back of the crowd, hundreds of yards from where I stood—a few thousand people hollering, and I was doing the same.
But before they had even begun to captivate the audience with their music, and make us dance uncontrollably at their feet, Das Racist had first made sure to ruffle the feathers of the elite crowd that stood before them, filling the air with palpably awkward and uncertain murmurs. “This is the most collegiate shit I ever seen,” Heems said when he had first walked onto the stage. With an expression that made it seem as if he was smelling something putrid, he continued: “You look like a Tommy Hilfiger ad.” He proceeded to greet the Ivy Leaguers with a “shout-out” to Queens College and Stony Brook University, both decidedly public institutions. The audience was thoroughly confused, and it only got worse. A couple of minutes later, Heems tried to lead the students in a chant of “I will drop out of this demon university”. I looked around and noticed several furious faces.
But when they started to perform their music, the crowd progressively loosened up and jumped right in, shedding any sense of discomfort that might have lingered. The fact is that Das Racist is a deceptively hard-working band—they’re aggressively ironic and ostentatiously sloppy, all of which is a front for heart-pumping effort and a great deal of commitment. At Columbia that warm spring afternoon, the three young rappers criss-crossed the stage metronomically and leaned into their vocals with tremendous gusto. Their energy was infectious, and as the dancing began in earnest, I turned around to get a better look at what was happening across the vast audience.
There in front of me was a pulsating vision of American multiculturalism in the 21st century. Blacks and whites and all shades in-between heaving together rapturously. Right next to me was a short Japanese man dancing with a lanky girl in a hijab. Pressed up against the fence on the other side was a young Indian woman with an audible desi accent. I watched her listen quietly for a bit, then hitch up her flowing skirt to dance, grinding against the broad black man behind her, who kept his hands on her hips the entire time.
Hakuna matata Pumba
Por que esta es la rumba
Yeah, I’m fucking great at rapping
—Das Racist, ‘Michael Jackson’
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TERLING REVIEWS of Relax—their first commercial album following on the heels of Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man, two highly acclaimed mixtapes released for free over the Internet in 2010—began to pile up long before the official release on 13 September. Rolling Stone hyped it up, an unusual occurrence for a debut on a brand-new independent label. |
And The New York Times, Maxim, Elle and many others chimed in with approval. A full fortnight before its release, Spin magazine’s influential critics had already awarded Relax eight out of 10 stars, a phenomenal score. But such accolades are no longer particularly surprising. It has been apparent for more than a year now that things have been going very right for Himanshu Suri, Victor Vasquez and Ashok Kondabolu, close friends who formed an unlikely rap group just three years ago.
Suri and Vasquez first met at Wesleyan University, an elite liberal arts college in Middletown, Connecticut, where they had seen their classmates, Benjamin Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden, put together the rock band MGMT and become global chart toppers straight after graduation. Inspired by the success story, they decided to try making it as musicians as well in 2008, when Suri reached out to Kondabolu, his best friend from high school, to serve as the group’s “hypeman” (although he doesn’t record, Kondabolu performs at concerts).
From the beginning, Das Racist went at the music business with terrific brio. The band didn’t try to get signed by a major label; instead, Suri started his own. He also manages the band, and, via his Greedhead Entertainment, the young rapper now also handles the business-end of things for several other aspiring bands, all of whom seem to be friends. And so in some ways, Das Racist comes across as a collective—with Suri, Vasquez and Kondabolu at the centre of a large and growing constellation of artists, filmmakers, designers and producers. This culture of nonstop collaboration has defined Das Racist’s ouevre; Relax alone features guest-rappers Danny Brown, Lakutis, Despot and El-P, as well as tracks recorded with members of indie bands like Vampire Weekend and Yeasayer, and the neo-bhangra heartthrob Bikram Singh.
Das Racist came soaring onto the radar of music critics at the end of 2008 with the release of ‘Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell’, a mind-numbingly catchy and repetitive track (“I’m at the Pizza Hut / I’m at the Taco Bell / I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”) that soon became a viral hit on the Internet and galvanised critics: ‘Combination’ “passes from grating to absurd to hilarious to poignant to transcendent”, wrote the Village Voice. When Sasha Frere-Jones, the New Yorker’s widely respected pop music critic, wrote about Das Racist in 2010, he dismissed ‘Combination’ as “dumb fun”, but he grouped them with Odd Future (aka Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All, or OFWGKTA), the foul-mouthed, teenage Californian crew that occupies the cutting-edge of rap music: “both are hip-hop acts as unsettling as they are entertaining”. Looking back, that signalled the moment Das Racist first started edging away from its initial reputation as hipster clowns. Now, they’re treated with considerable respect: earlier this year, the San Francisco Chronicle voiced an emerging consensus when it called the group “formidable, dead-serious rappers who could end up turning hip-hop on its head”.
Hip-hop got turned into hit pop,
The second a record hit number one on the Pop charts.
—3rd Bass, ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ (1991)
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P UNTIL 1980, rap and hip hop (technically not the same, but effectively interchangeable) constituted a subculture confined mostly to the South Bronx, a notoriously poor, crime-ridden and overwhelmingly black neighborhood in New York City. It took just three decades for its sounds and style to literally conquer the world, comprehensively replacing |
rock-and-roll as the preferred cultural expression of the post-boomer generations.
But there were no glimmers of anything like that happening until two soul music producers, Sylvia and Joey Robinson, decided to take a chance in late 1979 and record an unwieldy 15 minutes of friendly banter and stories rapped by the Sugarhill Gang over an irresistible bass-heavy hook from Chic’s ‘Good Times’, a big hit earlier that summer from the African-American disco and R&B band. The song that materialised, ‘Rapper’s Delight’, emerged from the hip hop scene to quickly scale the black music charts, and then went on to huge global success, selling millions of copies worldwide. At a time when the American music scene was still extremely segregated, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ broke down several walls and allowed hip hop to climb out of the ghetto. It is the highest-selling 12-inch single in history, and still a major musical influence. A few years ago, four Spanish sisters calling themselves Las Ketchup released what would become another massive global hit based entirely on their cutesy rendition of the opening lines of ‘Rapper’s Delight’.
But even with the introduction of major commercial stakes, the idea that hip hop would go global—that Spanish teenyboppers would eventually recite its lyrics—was utterly preposterous in the early 1980s. When the first American rappers toured Europe in 1983, audiences reacted with confusion, and occasionally anger. “I remember looking at the people and they would just sort of be looking at each other trying to figure out whether they should like it or not. They didn’t know how to react. It was so new,” recalled David Hershkowitz of the New York Daily News.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Monica
20 April 2012
02:06 PM
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This is neither piiltocs nor election. I have no qualification to be a pastor, scholar, philosopher, or leader. I have no interest to improve any political or religious systems because this is not my job. I do not want to increase any bad influence on someone. If we have the problems of Bible’s versions, kindly ask the pastor or the Pope, please. I have no exact answer, can we find out together?Why do we need dilemma?Do we need a dilemma?Do we believe constellations?Do we really believe 4 or 22 represents anything?Do we need a media(b-) and a political bureau which are creating a dilemma on the wicked person without a job and hated by some merchants and someone else?Do we need any junk mails or numerous virus which are called W32.Gammima.AG, Infostealer. Lineage, Bloodhound. Packed.Jmp, Infostealer. Gampass, Trojan. Dropper, Hacktool. Rootkit, Inforstealer.Perfwo, Hacktool Rootkit, Packed.Generic.61, Trojan Horse from December 2007 to April 22, 2008? Can we find out who ever sent any junk mails or numerous virus to attack your computer or steal your data?Do we need to use junk mail or numerous virus to create a dilemma, news, or political purpose?Do you really believe a person can have the magic and miracle?Do we really believe a person who likes or dislikes to talk is God?Is the global warming a disaster or a chance from a chosen person or notchosen person marked by someone?Is democratism, communism, or the divine right of kings good?Is humanity or technology good or bad?Is control or freedom good or bad?Is good or bad really a question?God bless you!
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shoutsto215
30 September 2011
01:50 AM
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video from the Columbia show:
"All the white people say 'I will drop out of this demon university' "
http://youtu.be/5L3FDomMyS4?t=7m24s
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