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?
Das Racist
Das Racist: Relax [Greedhead, 2011]
The first album that these self-professed rap-deconstructionists will be making money off of is somewhat of a concept album about making money, specifically, how bad they are at it. Because Relax is both more serious and more sincere than the great one-two punch of 2010’s Shut, Up Dude and Sit Down, Man, and because they’re not stealing from Ghostface and Billy Joel or Jay-Z and the Doors anymore, it’s a more difficult listen. But for those of us who found profundity in their humor, it also makes a more engaging, not to say consistent, listen. In the irresistible title track, Heems gives a very un-ironic shout-out to his parents– “back in 1980, from Delhi to Queens / She had a pocket full of lint, he had a suitcase full of dreams”– before describing himself, in a characteristically self-referential manner, as a “brown Chris Farley.” This segues into a very meta “Michael Jackson,” which reminds us that of course matters it if you’re black or white (or ‘other’).
The rest of the album continues to develop this dual-fascination of the group: American mass culture and their place (as second-generation americans) in it. These hip-hop outsiders– both racially (Indian, Dominican) and socially (Wesleyan grads)– have not lost their (always serious) funny. The jokes here are just as sharp, if less ubiquitous, as the ones in their non-for-profit albums. Money can allow you do some pretty great things– like bringing in El-P (who is growing on me) and Diplo, as well as the dude from synth-freaks Chairlift and Danny Brown. To the former, they owe the great and purposefully East-Indian sounding hook of “Relax,” while the latter pops in “Power” only to have the show stolen by possible Dostoevsky-fan Despot: “life check, 1, 2, what is this? / your money or your life?/ and I’m like, ‘what’s the difference?’” A false dichotomy? Nah, they’re just having fun.
TONIGHT'S THE DAY 