Das Racist, shot for SPIN's November 2011 issue by Christian Anwander
Why funny is deadly serious: Read guest editor Patton Oswalt's introduction to SPIN's first ever "Funny" Issue.
NOTE: I will refer to the Brooklyn-based rap trio Das Racist as "DR" for the majority of this story, both for convenience and to guard against the readership of this publication from either flipping to or clicking on a different article after repeated use of the word racist. (Yes, I am a writer of color, but feel free to pretend I'm white if it makes this paragraph seem less accusatory and more snarky. White people love snarky. Minorities reading this: We're good, right?)
Video by the NY Frequency
My little brother Ashok, or "Dap" as he is known and I refuse to call him, is DR's hype man. His job is to know all the lyrics to the songs and enthusiastically repeat them onstage, often while dancing, which somehow makes my occupation as a professional comedian sound stable by comparison. This is reflected in how our relatives in India describe us to curious friends and neighbors: Ashok gets transformed into a "singer" and I become a "lawyer." This is much more respectable, I suppose, than "crazy man who talks to strangers" (me) and "crazy man who yells at strangers" (Ashok).
Click to enlarge
Click to enlarge
When I was first told about my brother's job, I didn't know how to feel. Part of the confusion, I suppose, was that I hadn't bothered listening to the music, despite knowing that my brother, his best friend since high school Himanshu Suri (Heems), and Hima's Wesleyan University classmate Victor Vazquez (Kool A.D.) were performing regularly in Brooklyn and Ashok was excited about it. Part of me still sees Ashok's existence on this planet as a result of my parents not wanting me to be bored. The possibility that he could have a life and destiny unconnected to my own seemed absurd.
Older siblings can be assholes.
According to the official description on their booking agency's website, DR is "a white-guilt art project/science experiment/ponzi scheme piloted by Heems, KOOL A.D., and the Honorable Prophet Dapwell." The inclusion of the word project at least is accurate: The music is, of course, the primary aspect of their work, with songs that seamlessly weave self-aware deconstructions of racial politics into a rapid-fire collage of pop-cultural, historical, and academic references reading both as poetry and comedy. There is also something inherently political about brown men (Ashok and Himanshu are Indian) who do not scan as black or white (Victor is half-black and half-white) talking about their place in a nation and an art form — hip-hop — that sees them as outsiders.
Hima expresses this frustration in the track "Shut Up, Man," off their first proper album, Relax, released in September: "They say I act white, but sound black / But act black, but sound white / But what's my sound bite supposed to sound like?" It is part of a trademark style of shrewd social observations and references to people, places, and things that add to a longer discussion only hinted at in the music. Their lyrics are a reading, listening, and viewing list for a later time — you can dance and nod your head to the music now, but if you want the full experience, start Googling.
After reading articles about DR over the past couple of years, the question that comes up repeatedly is: "Are they joking or are they serious?" This has followed them since 2008, when their song "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" went viral. Was it simply a funny song about two friends going to the wrong fast-food restaurant, or did it say more about the state of American culture? Does the repetition in the song symbolize the Mobius-strip repetition of chains that appear throughout the country? Or something more? They officially responded in the song "hahahaha jk?" from last year's mixtape Sit Down, Man, with the chorus "We're not joking / Just joking, we are joking / Just joking, we're not joking."
"People who ask things like that are unfunny idiots who take themselves too seriously and don't understand how jokes work," Ashok has told me. You can be funny and say what you mean; these ideas are not mutually exclusive. Some of the best jokes came from people who meant it. See: Pryor, Bruce, Carlin, etc.
I discuss many of the same issues DR does in my comedy, including but not limited to: racism, colonialism, politics, and cocoa butter. We use jokes as a way to defend ourselves and to call out bullshit that angers us while attempting not to be corny or preachy. However, the last album I bought might have been Modest Mouse's The Moon & Antarctica or TV on the Radio's Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes. I am frozen musically somewhere around 2004. Compared to my brother, I've always felt like a 45-year-old "cool dad" (I'm 29 and childless).
It's a mild Thursday in September, two days after Relax has come out and is currently, if briefly, holding at No. 3 on iTunes' hip-hop chart behind Watch the Throne and Tha Carter IV. I walk into my brother's railroad apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn, which has become DR's makeshift headquarters. Victor and Hima are on the couch, drinking tea, bleary from a long day of promo. Ashok is on his computer in the adjacent room, and pops in and out of the conversation. I give Victor a hug and rub Hima's belly.
They are educated men of color, the children of immigrants from diverse and complicated places on both coasts (Victor from the Bay Area and Hima and Ashok from Queens). They are aware of the historical and social context of this moment, their place in it, and how to manipulate the media, which I am now, awkwardly, part of. I press record and stumble through the first question. I avoid eye contact initially because I worry we'll all start laughing.
