Sam Han | Eportfolio

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of the United States, at this very hour.

Required reading for 4 July.

 

If they were just fucking around, those gags would wear off and leave you with nothing but a series of smug hey-get-it? nudges. But Heems and Victor are serious enough about coming up with memorable lines that they come across like some kind of lyrical stealth operatives. The fact that they often go from water-treading repetition to intricately built phraseology mid-verse is a great riff in itself. One of the shortest and simplest lines on the album is one of the cleverest– “W.E.B. DuBois/ We be da boys,” from “Hugo Chavez”– but there are also moments where you’re left wondering how they could make so many unexpected linguistic connections look so easy. Their go-hard rampage on “Nutmeg” is 1990s-reared, cipher-honed style gone berserk, turning a funhouse mirror on Ghostface’s finest moment of abstract pyrotechnics, as it starts with the unlikely couplet “Queens Boulevard/ Kierkegaard” and gets even more dizzyingly ridiculous from there.

Granted, there’s a certain information-overload college-student bent to their humor, evident in cross-genre namedrops like “Richard Hell Rell” or the mentions of Tao Lin and “and Dinesh DiSouza. But Das Racist push past mere signifying to come across as straight-up literates with a way of making cultural studies out of entertainment and vice-versa. Several lyrics take offhand references to Bollywood stars and Cuban sandwiches and extrapolate stream-of-consciousness ethnographies out of them, while “Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)” draws out punchlines and commentary about identification by listing all the racially divergent celebrities that women supposedly claim Victor and Heems resemble (Egyptian Lover; Amitabh Bachchan; Slash without his hat). Das Racist approach this idea of otherness in a way that feels both playful and provocative, asserting their identities in a way that both reinforces their individuality and goofs on their stereotypes. And if it hits a certain nerve, it’s probably the same one that got tweaked by the sociological b-boy stoner comedy precedent of “Chappelle’s Show”. Fast-food hipster-rap, my ass– these dudes are the truth.

I helped come up with the Du Bois line along with my sophomore year college hall mates Noah Isaacs and Dan Reif. Hima has already confirmed this. So in other words, I share .000008 of the 7.8 rating.