[For a proper introduction to this blog, please see the Mission Statement]

DAS RACIST

We begin with the legendary ‘joke rap’ duo, because, despite their incredible goofiness, their mixtapes Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man have cast huge shadows over the way I’ve experienced and listened to hip-hop in the 2010s. At the tail-end of the near-disastrous excesses of the 2000s1, these guys showed up to remind us that hip-hop is fun to simply nerd-out over without taking too seriously; that we can love hip-hop without making the horrific mistake of trying too hard to emulate its imagery (for us white folk, see: Malibu’s Most Wanted). For these reasons, to properly introduce you to DR, we will start with their most heinous, blasphemous, and ridiculous song, the song they first gained recognition for: “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”.

Here’s a snippet from Wikipedia on the reactions incited by the track:

In March 2009,Baltimore-based electronic musician Dan Deacon referred to “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” as “a track that will last the ages” in XLR8R magazine.[24] Death & Taxes magazine described the song as “an existential meditation on consumer identity in corporate America” and “both feverishly juvenile and somehow profound”.[25] After playing at the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon, the New York Times described Das Racist’s set as “characteristically shambolic, and characteristically entertaining, holding together a half-hour set of half-performed songs with hyperliterate reference points and self-aware charm”.[26]

When Shut Up, Dude came out in early 2010, among its many goofy tracks, this was the one that inspired so many to ask incredulously, ‘Is this a joke?’ To which DR would definitively respond on their next mixtape Sit Down, Man with the track “hahahaha jk?” which features the refrain, “we’re not joking / just joking / we are joking / just joking / we’re not joking”. Their refusal to really answer to allegations of being mere jesters would become idiosyncratic of the attitude prevalent throughout all of their work.

Himanshu Suri (Heems) and Victor Vazquez (Kool AD)2 are of Punjabi-Indian and Afro-Cuban descent respectively, but for all their silly posturing, these guys are hip-hop nerds, so when they say things like, “these zooted brown weirdos is wildin’ / but they can really rap!”, they mean it. They pay homage to a massive range of hip-hop: Shut Up, featuring a few classic hip-hop beats reinterpreted; references abound on both tapes, these guys know that every rap-nerd’s favorite trope of the genre is the inclusiveness of recognizing borrowed lines and references across songs, between artists; many of their songs function as a self-contained mini-lesson in hip-hop aphorisms and tropes, while constantly staying aloof and countering every serious reference with “some silly dumb shit”.

Whether they’re freestyling a hilarious list of things white people like (“hahahaha jk?”), putting their rhyming abilities on full display against underground mainstay, El-P (“Sit Down, Man”), or even just composing odes to Arizona Ice Tea cans for never wavering in price (“One Dolla Can”), DR carved out their own space with flourish and bravado in a genre that hasn’t been this fun or unserious since De La Soul and the Native Tongues came on the scene in the late ‘80s.

Most importantly for our upcoming discussions in this guide, I believe that DR, in many ways, set the stage for a rearrangement of identity and what can be ‘real’ in hip-hop by being two self-proclaimed students of hip-hop who simultaneously exalt it and deconstruct it with humor; Heems and Kool AD exploded onto the scene with such an intense goofiness they seemingly broke the self-serious spell of the aughts and opened up new pathways for the rest of the decade. That they were ahead of their time I have no doubt, and, while we were graced with two beautiful mixtapes and a pretty good album, Das Racist would go on to breakup shortly afterwards, and release pretty solid solo projects in the following years.

JAY ELECTRONICA

The famously mysterious and elusive rapper who dropped two incredibly important singles in ’09 and 2010 that were a perfect culmination of the 2000s sound with incredibly tight rhymes that harkened back to what I imagine the ‘old-school’ fan means when he refers to the good-old-’90s. “Exhibit C”. This is rap in its ‘purest’ form: plinking pianos, sweeping loops of strings, rumbling bass, boom-bap drums, all the steadfast production of Just Blaze and the steady cadence of rhymes that wind increasingly complex throughout the song to this megabomb of a line:

They call me Jay Electronica—fuck that

call me Jay ElecHanukkah, Jay ElecYarmulke

Jay ElecRamadaan, Muhammad A’salaamaleikum

RasoulAllah Subhanahu wa ta’ala through your monitor”



(A line then referenced in Das Racist’s “Puerto Rican Cousins” the very next year).

And then there’s “Shiny Suit Theory”. The beat comes from The Ambassadors’ “Ain’t Got the Love of One Girl (On My Mind)” stripped of its drums in noticeable contrast to the first time it was used as a hip-hop sample by Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth with boosted drums idiosyncratic of ’90s boom-bap. The result is delightfully lo-fi and to me, before I knew about the beat’s origins, alway felt like some sort of 40s pop apocrypha, especially with The-Dream’s vinyl-crackling solo at the end. This is another excellent showcase of Jay Elec’s ample and at-ease rhyming ability, similar in content to “Exhibit C” about his rise from nothing to notable. As a bonus, we get the only worthy Jay-Z verse of the decade on this song, and, in my opinion, his best since D’Evils.

Jay Elec also dropped the cool experimental project, billed Act 1: Eternal Sunshine, on his myspace(!) in 2007. It’s a 15-minute mixtape of him rhyming over looped samples from the eponymous movie soundtrack, without drums. The short EP highlights his spirituality and worldliness, the first part being a whirlwind of fast rhymes and probably the best part of the project.

Infuriatingly, besides releasing a few more singles—all of which are also good—Jay has never released a proper album despite threatening to do so for seven fucking years. We have all but given up on the possible relevance of Act 2 in 2016, as he himself toils into obscurity with vaguely threatening tweets towards actual superstars like Kendrick Lamar3, with a vapid sense of impunity that will never be justified without an album to back such ludicrous claims. But as Kendrick himself succinctly put it, “I could never end a career if it never start”.

FURTHER LISTENING // VIEWING

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1. Between the grillz, piles of gold chains, XXXL clothing, Pimp my Ride, Cribs, auto-tune, outrageous misogyny, ignance, codeine abuse (an unfortunate side effect of the 2000s which has continued into the 2010s and brought prescription-drug abuse with it), irresponsible posturing of so-called ‘ideals’ of masculinity—can we agree that the height of mainstream hip-hop in the 2000s reached a level of self-caricature so self-serious and goofy as to border on absurdity? This is not to take away from the music itself; indeed there were some amazing songs—specifically, production—to come out of the decade, and it’s fun to listen back on them now as ‘classics’ of a bygone era. But the self-obsessed image of the average hip-hop celebrity in the mid aughts remains as like some kind of 90s coke-fueled hangover; that instead of just calling it quits for a day kept wildin’ out for another decade until seemingly everybody was bankrupt and so burnt out that the party was not only no longer fun, but morally concerning. ↩

2.Das Racist is in fact a trio consisting of Heems, Kool AD, and their hypman Dapwell (Ashok Kondabolu), who , while also a vital and equally funny part of the group, nevertheless does not strictly appear in any of the music. While Dap’s wikipedia page states he is a ‘rapper’, he has not to my knowledge ever provided any vocal content to a DR project outside of skits or ad-libs. For our purposes, he is relegated to a footnote. Sorry, Dap.↩

3. (and this a few years after the two appeared on loosie Big Sean track, “Control”, that, if you were even somewhat cognizantly aware at the time, saw Kendrick’s verse completely blow up the internet and even public media spheres, while Big Sean’s and Jay Elec’s verses were all but ignored [all though that’s not to say that Jay slacked on the song, in fact his verse is pretty incredible too—full of biblical reference and metaphor—just not as headline-worthy as explicitly calling out the hottest rappers in the game])↩