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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times/ it was the combination best of times worst of times”

Asking if Das Racist is joking or serious or even trying to play the middle by asking if they’re seriously joking seems to me to be missing the point of the music.  Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez are Brooklyn based rappers who create hip-hop utilizing a vocabulary of low, middle and highbrow cultures drawing from many musical backgrounds to produce a singular style that is about their atypical minority experience. Songs such as “Fake Patois” about musical artists who affect different accents to pay musical tribute to Jamaican musical culture; “Shorty Said” is about racially insensitive (at best) things said to them by women.  The music and lyrical content is a wonderful minefield of hidden references that when discovered, causes your face to explode into a smile.  I was eager to see them perform a full live show, having witnessed a memorable guest appearance during Bear Hands’ set at Siren Fest 2009.  Thankfully, they didn’t disappoint.

The bill for last night at The Studio at Webster Hall was Natureboy Jim Kelly, Body Language, Best Fwends and Das Racist.  I’d seen Best Fwends last year at CMJ and had been a fan for a few years previous, so I was ready for a short, high energy set with a large amount of props, interaction, overly dramatic stylized dancing and a Toadies cover.  I wasn’t familiar with the other acts, but Body Language was a very pleasant surprise.

Edwina and I made it there at the start of Body Language’s set.  The four-piece band was two people on keys and samplers, a drummer, and a singer/ xylophonist all making complex yet gentle electronic music in the Code Breaker mold.  Layers of drums, synths and percussive samples meld together to present songs in a number of different electronic genres from electrogaze to straight up house.  Vocal duties seemed to be evenly split between Mathew Young, Grant Young and Angelica Bess while Ian Cheng remained behind the drum kit.  Angelica’s voice was able to do both low-key breathy such as their cover of The Detroit Grand Puba’s “Sandwiches” and also capable or providing an effective coupling to either of her male vocalists for songs like “Work This City.”

Listening to their EP, Speaks, will give you an idea of what they’re like live, yet the EP seems to be focused more on their softer side, while the live arrangements were certainly designed with body movement in mind.  The small crowd in the venue was right in their wavelength and while no actual dancing took place, a lot of people were counting time with their head nods and tapping feet.  The EP is excellent and you should expect a review when I can find the time to write one.

Best Fwends is made up of Anthony Davis and Dustin Pilkington both out of Forth Worth, a city known for basically being considered Dallas, Texas by people who don’t live there.  By all accounts, it’s a pretty boring place which explains how two people were basically able to lock themselves into a room and create electronic music fast as hell on what sounds like toy keyboards and microphones.  If you’ve only heard their releases Alphabetically Arranged or Not-So-Alphabetically Arranged, then you’re really unprepared for the live show.

Dustin, the redhead, seems to lead most of the songs and dances while Anthony seems to be the more introverted of the two.  There is a large amount of staged elements found in their sets, such as the song “Hail”, a thrash metal emulation which involved them taking on the mantle of metal singers throwing up the goat on each chant of “Hail!” then becoming almost monkish as they fold their hands into prayer during an instrumental section of the song, as following a dark faith, they close their eyes and stride in a circle through the audience to end up back where they began in time for the song’s end.  Each track is short blast of nonsense and their sets inevitably carry this building nonsensical juxtapositions culminating in improvised chaos, as inflated gargoyles unleashed earlier are pulled from their housings and used to pummel the audience as though it were a bouncy castle’s revenge fantasy.

There is a sense of play in the sets as though Best Fwends are using childish imagery and blasts of noise to get you to reconnect with the hyperactive over stimulated elements of your inner child’s past.  The same part of you that used to mash GI Joe toys together to emulate both fighting and fucking.

Das Racist I think are very much aware of their reputation as “Those pizza hut rappers on the blogs” and delighted in both matching the expectations of the audience while also subverting the same expectations to provide a pretty unique live experience.  There’s not much in the way of segues between songs.  Musically, it was basically an instrumental playlist on an IPod, making the full audience focal point the performers themselves.  If Himanshu and Victor weren’t excellent performers with a good sense of the theatrical, then it would have been really boring to watch. Himanshu was the more active of the two, at one point climbing onto the sprinkler system pipes of the ceiling and hanging there for a bit while continuing his verses, climbing onto the monitors to tower over the audience, and reclining on the stage, making his white shirt very grimy by the end of the set.  Victor utilizes a comparably detached charisma and hilarious wordplay to maintain the audience’s interest.

The inter song banter was great.  After one track and issues with finding the next on the IPod, we were informed the rest of the set would be “A symposium on post colonialism led by Cornell West” when he couldn’t be located, it was surmised he had just stepped out and Das Racist would perform until he returned.  Funny, fun shit aimed at a highly informed or educated crowd.  This continued through to the on the fly changes to the song lyrics most notably in “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” where the normal chorus of “I’m at the Pizza Hut, I’m At the Taco Bell / I’m at the Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” was replaced with many different words such as “I’m at your mother’s house, I’m at your Sister’s House, I’m at the combination your mother’s house your sister’s house” and my favorite “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times/ it was the combination best of times worst of times.”

Das Racist is wonderful with a unique take on Rap utilizing it to make points about race relations, make commentary on hip-hop itself, the nature of comedy and also just living in New York, yet with a degree of intelligence which differentiates them from say Biz Markee or with a different cultural experience from more similar artists like Paul Barman.  Check them out, their full album “Shut Up, Dude” recently came out.  There’s a hell of a lot more to them than the novelty track and you owe it to yourself to not dismiss them based on that one song.

Category : Show Review