Das Racist
Biography
You’d be forgiven if the phrase “Brooklyn two-piece” made all the alarms on your hipster detector go into overload, so prepare yourself for Brooklyn two-piece Das Racist. Their blend of beat-driven hip-hop and sly sense of humour would sit comfortably alongside the glory days of Slick Rick and Paul’s Boutique-era Beastie Boys, while still maintaining enough self-aware wit to cut it with today’s fickle youth.
Members Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez met at Wesleyan University, Connecticut in 2003, where they were classmates with a certain Ben Goldwasser and Andrew Van Wyngarden of MGMT. It wasn’t until 2008 though, after the duo released their song ‘Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell’ that they first started earning the attention of the music industry. The song’s heavy use of repetition polarised opinions on release, earning the band a well deserved ‘Marmite’ reputation amongst music fans (the band themselves describe their music as a combination of “non sequiturs, Dadaism, repetition, repetition.”) After releasing songs via their website and MySpace a number of critics placed the band in their ‘Ones to Watch’ lists for 2010, including Spin magazine and the New York Times, who deemed their performance at the 2009 CMJ Music Marathon particularly worthy of praise.
Their first album the Shut Up, Dude mixtape, released as a free download in March 2010 along with an accompanying internet game, received a positive critical response, with Pitchfork crediting the band with “subverting the rules of hip-hop lyricism even as they pay them respect.” In impressively prolific fashion, their second album, the Sit Down, Man mixtape, was released last month, boasting a stellar line-up of collaborators, including Diplo, El-P, Chairlift and Devo Springsteen (which has to be the best name for a person, ever). Their ability to balance their comedic urges with the need to actually provide some funky tunes is easy to see in songs like ‘Puerto Rican Cousins’ (complete with its ‘We Are Family’ hook) and ‘You Can Sell Anything’ boasting production credits from Diplo. The step-up in quality ingredients resulted in their album being hailed as a marked improvement on their first.
Music isn’t these boys’ only passion either. Vazquez, while also being a member of indie-electro band Boy Crisis, is an accomplished cartoonist and poet. When a New Yorker music critic claimed hip-hop was dead last year the band responded by submitting an essay and series of haikus after being urged to by Flavorwire. The pair also have a hand in political activism, curating 2009’s Minority Fest in New York, providing a platform for artists of varying ethnic backgrounds to perform and discuss what it is like being a non-white performer in the world of art.
While there has been a resurgence in the popularity of comedy-embracing artists in recent times, and more likely to appeal to indie fans than hip-hop purists, Das Racist’s superior song craft makes them no mere joke band. Their pair of albums are just as likely to get you on the dancefloor as result in you attempting to untangle their vast web of literary and political references, but what’s for certain is you’d have a bloody good time doing either in their company.
That mixtape can be downloaded in it's entirety from djbooth.net right HERE
Links
Tour Dates
19th October - Piano’s, New York
20th October - Piano’s, New York
21st October - Santos Party House, New York
Videos
“Who’s That? Brooown” Video
“Ek Shaneesh” Video
“Sabotage” Cover