Day Two of North Coast Music Festival: we are rockin' and rollin' all night to the killer back-to-back combo of Boys Noize and Moby, a 1-2 punch so smooth that no one even noticed when they transitioned DJs. Our energy carries us to a nearby bar for a while before we head up north to Wicker Park where we find solace in the soulful vinyl mixed beats at Danny's.
To rest our busy heads we finally retire to my place where Samson awaited us. After a bit of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and my sidekick passing out, I decided I needed something more mind-warping so I turned to Pitchfork.tv who rarely disappoints in this department. Sure enough I discover a smorgasbord of trippy and mind-boggling videos (my new dream job: get paid to find crazy videos). One that surely stood out was a goofy hip hop song with a video that resembled an 8-bit video game. Turns out to be a story of two guys who are trying to find their third member so they can go perform a show in NYC: "Jay-Z and Justin Bieber's shared stretch Hummer got hit by a meteor on the way to their show. The promoter wants us to sub for them... in 3 hours." They hunt all over the city, all the while traversing through modded levels of various classic 8-bit video games, from Elevator Action to Double Dragon. Honestly I was so entertained by the NES-inspired video and the hilarious dialogue on the screen that I barely heard any words to the song, except of course the eponymous chorus, "Who's That? Brooown!"
Since then I had to rewatch it several times, each time subsequently ingraining the catchy tune more and more in my head until I finally discovered the source, Das Racist's "Shut Up, Dude" mixtape. Released in March, I am far behind in discovering it, let alone blogging about it. Yet in the past couple weeks I have listened to it incessantly, impressed with its catchy beats and funny yet slick rhymes.
First off, if you're not familiar with these guys, they are basically three multi-racial slackers from Brooklyn. Das Racist is mainly comprised of Himanshu Suri from Queens and Victor Vazquez from San Francisco, and are complemented by a third guy, Ashok Kondabolu, who apparently performs with them (referred to as their "Hype Man", he's the one they had to find in the music video). They're first song to get attention wasn't even "Who's That? Brooown?" but the rather mind-bogglingly simplistic, seemingly Harold & Kumar-inspired, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell". The song was some sort of internet sensation when it caught on, and although I find very little interesting about it, it serves as sort of a microcosm for the rest of the mixtape and what Das Racist is apparently all about: plain, simple 21st century-oversaturated-with-entertainment-thanks-to-technology fun.
Want to make a song about getting high and getting really confused about Taco Bell/Pizza Hut? Let's do it. Want to speed up Billy Joel's "You Oughta Know" and half sing/half mumble the original words before rhyming over it about getting high? Let's do it. Want to not rap over Ghostface's "Nutmeg" beat, not about getting high (they did start off rhyming about eating pizza...) but referncing everyone from Kanye to Jesus to Parappa da Rappa to TLC? Let's do it.
From Rainbow in the Dark:
We make a sound even if nobody's around
Like a tree or the tears of a clown
Yo, I'm afraid of clowns, I'm afraid of small towns
Positive energy is something like I'm afraid of all frowns
Catch me at the crib getting light to Jeff Mangum
It's fun to do bad things like rhyme about handguns
If any problem pop off
I'll Joe Pesci any fool while drinking that Popov
That's cause I'm a Goodfella
Stay up out the hood hella much now
But punch clowns if they touch down
While I'm eating lunch now
While I'm eating a burger
Metaphysical spiritual lyrical murder
Simplicity is only at the core of their style. The sampled beats, the loose delivery, the subject of the rhymes, and even the content of the rhymes often are effortless and in theory elementary. Yet somehow with the execution, many tracks reach that level of complexity where you are focusing as hard as you can, and you are still struggling to keep up with what's being said and what it means (and this is when I'm sober!). Unlike the music video, there are no stories to any of the songs, but rather the most common approach to the songs are a free association that drop pop culture references into a big melting pot. They're not systematically arranged like in a mosaic, but rather spilled in smooth and raw in a way that I would expect from Brooklynites. The ethnically diverse roots of the artists juxtaposed with their NYC burrough upbringing may be the farthest thing from authentic an old sense of the word, but with so much progress towards multiculturalism in our urban landscape, Das Racist ironically stands out as an authentic voice from the melting pot of America.
From Don Dada:
Is it parody, comedy, novelty, or scholarly
A little bit of column A, a little bit ocolumn B
A little common projects, a little bit of wallabies
Probably, you can always find me where the challah be
With 17 tracks clocking in at over an hour, and styles ranging from piano pop to gangster rap to reggae to skewery electronic hodgepodge, there is a diversity echoed by the skin colors of the artists as much as by the colors in their logo on the mixtape cover.
Let's hope the most recent mixtape, "Sit Down, Dude", is just as compelling, but more importantly, fun.
Links:
"Shut Up, Dude" mixtape
"Who's That? Brooown!" video
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