Das Racist have redefined rap music for me.
Equal parts “laughing at stupid shit while stoned” and “biting satire/critique of racism & consumerism”, they’re the only rap group I’ve ever heard that’s made me think about marginalization and laugh at a pun combining Richard Hell & Hell Rell, all in the span of eight seconds.
The world needs more scathingly intelligent party rap jamz, which is why I was happy to talk to Das Racist (comprised of Victor/Kool A.D., Hima/Young Coco Butter, and Dapwell) about bad Toronto reggae, Marina Abramovic, and flogging dead horses of various varities. Their fantastic “Shut Up Dude” mixtape that you can download for free here, by the way.
Interview by Brendan Arnott (my text in bold)
When was the last time that Das Racist felt super uncomfortable?
KOOL A.D: We played a private party at some sort of Revenge of the Nerds style fraternity up in Cambridge at MIT and I was under the influence of a number of chemicals, “psychedelic” and otherwise. I couldn’t stop thinking about the huge amount of influence that the institution I was at had on the world. These are people who every year are recruited for the same banks who were largely responsible for the economic crash, people who every year are recruited to work in the labs of irresponsible pharmaceutical companies whose self-interested pursuit of profits and whose lobbying are a large part of why our health care system is so immensely inefficient, people who might end up designing new fighter drones or nuclear weapons for our military or private military corpoartions. At the same time these were people who could find solutions to problems like the large scale implementations of alternative energies that could wean us off our dependency on oil/natural gas/coal energies that causes much of the violence and political/envirnomental/economic strife in the world, or cures for diseases, etc. And also they were just people who wanted to “get fucked up” and “have fun” but many of whom were also socially awkward in ways I rarely encounter in my day-to-day life.
I was having a hard time relating to them and was also having an internal existential crisis. Why did they want us to come up and perform these raps for them? What did they want from the music and what did they want from us? Who did they think we were? Who did I think I was? Typical “psychedlic” drug shit I guess. But yeah, between the “Little Eichmann”/White Devil vibes and the Friendly-Nerds-Who-Just-Want-to-Have-Fun vibes (both of which were also present to a slightly lesser degree at Wesleyan University where Hima and I went to college) and the whole Why-Do-People-Like-This? chaser along with the strong chemical cocktail really had me struggling to be a person among people.
It was hard to listen to anything other than my bugged out inner monologue. I kept vascillating between a sense of fairly unfounded inferiority to such a huge intimidating powerful institution and a sort of sense fairly unfounded superiority to a number of people, who for all their good traits, seemed so culturally different from me as to come across as ignorant. And as I was trying to negotiate that push-and-pull I would swing from amusement to awe to distrust and paranoia to despair back to amusement but I think it’s fair to say I was “super uncomfortable” for much of that time.
Hima: One time someone reached out to us to play a benefit for a friend of his that had a brian tumor. Yes. Of course. This is what, if anything, is a way we can use getting trashed on stage for white people for good. We decided a while ago we would play any benefit people wanted us to for free and try to make money when, if ever, we could. Dap, Victor and I show up to this strange hotel in Midtown Manhattan. I hate Midtown. It terrifies me. It reeks of money. I had a pretty white-devil job, though at a firm ran and operated by Indian-Americans and we once almost moved to midtown. I was terrified. It terrifies me. So we show up to this place and the guy throwing it immediately makes a joke about how, “hah”, the “Chocolate Rain” guy is over there. He wasn’t. I’d talk to that dude if he was. That’s irrelevant.
So we’re at this show for some hurt dude thrown by his boy that loves how “viral” we are. THEN WE PLAYED A SHOW TO A ROOM OF STRANGE WHITE PEOPLE IN “MODIFIED EUROPEAN COURT ATTIRE”, AS DAP SAYS. IT WAS STRANGE. I FELT LIKE A CLOWN. WHAT THE FUCK. THE DUDE WITH THE BRAIN TUMOR WASNT EVEN THERE. THE DUDE THAT LOVED OUR PIZZA HUT SONG SO MUCH THAT HIS FRIEND ASKED US IF WE COULD PLAY A BENEFIT FOR HIM. I’D RATHER JUST HAVE KICKED IT WITH DUDE FOR AN HOUR. COME ON!!
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