Das Racist: Sit Down Man [Greedhead, 2010]

Das Racist’s second mixtape is slightly more even and slightly more serious than the first. Growth is always a scabrous problem in pop music, worth discussing but not without caution. “They’re learning how to write songs instead of just rap for four minutes at a time,” opines Ian Cohen in a well-written review on Pitchfork. This isn’t true. Sure, “Hahahaha jk?” and “Fashion Party” are intelligible as songs qua songs, but so were “Fake Patois” and “Shorty Said.” “Hahahaha jk?,” which samples the theme song for The Days of Our Life, is clearly the centerpiece here, and as close to an artistic manifesto as I suspect they’ll ever articulate: “we’re not joking / just joking / we are joking / just joking / we’re not joking.” “All Tan Everything” jacks a beat from Jay-Z and ends up being one of the catchiest, and “Puerto Rican Cousins” expands on the questions they raised in “Shorty Said.” Later on there’s an uncharacteristically focused satire on the fashion industry but also on the hype-machine. Then comes a second Dada experiment in deconstructing classic rock. Or so they’d have you believe. Me, I think they love the Doors and I think they love Jay-Z too– it’s just a complicated love. But isn’t that the only kind worth having?

8/10