Brown Comedy

Ever since Brooklyn’s Das Racist dropped ‘Combination Pizza Hut And Taco Bell’ in 2009, observers have wondered whether they’re a joke or an act worth taking seriously. But do these two things have to be mutually exclusive?

“Only to small-minded people,” says Himahshu Suri (aka Heems), hyper-literate MC, band manager and de facto performance artist. “It's that classic cliché of black comedy: laughing to keep from crying.”
It’s not a difficult concept to grasp – entertainers have used comedy as a vehicle to tackle serious social issues since at least as far back as Lenny Bruce – but people seem to be struggling with it nonetheless.

For their part, Suri and collaborator Victor Vazquez (aka Kool A.D.) have played up the ambiguity on tracks like ‘hahahaha jk?’ (named one of the 50 best singles of 2010 by Rolling Stone), with its mocking chorus: ‘We’re not joking / Just joking, we are joking / Just joking, we’re not joking’. “That ambiguity has probably hurt us, in a way,” Suri concedes now. “It's prevented a lot of people from taking us seriously.”

That’s their loss. The release of debut LP ‘Relax’ in September confirmed there’s not a smarter, more relevant group operating in hip hop right now than Suri, Vazquez and hype man Ashok Kondabolu (aka Dap). While their lyrics often require detailed annotations to be fully understood, the album also came loaded with dancefloor-friendly hooks as part of a self-conscious bid to become more ‘accessible’.
“What’s hard about that,” Suri says, “is gauging what people want from your music and why people listen to your music. That's something we've been unable to figure out in a lot of ways. We write for ourselves, so it's surprising to see people relate to our experiences of being a brown kid in 2011.

“I don't know what people consider to be accessible. It's probably a dangerous game. But we expected people's expectations and we tried to accommodate them a little bit.”
Accommodate them, but not bow down to them. For all the talk about Das Racist as hoarders and dispensers of pop culture references, ‘Relax’ is more focused on Suri and Vazquez’s life experiences in the two years since they first broke through to something resembling the mainstream.

“I don't have as much time to watch TV or read things on the internet,” Suri explains, “because I'm trying to manage this band and promote a record and play shows around the world. It's difficult to take in what's going on and let it marinate and put it back out. I think with this record, a lot of people weren't necessarily happy with how that happened.

“We are talking more about the experience of being rappers now, and talking about us as people, and it turns out people would rather hear you be humorous. You know, it's hard. You get pigeonholed as a joke and then you get pigeonholed for your hyper-referential humour. The next thing is, you try to break out of that.”

Count Pitchfork, one of Das Racist’s relatively early boosters, among those who have been disillusioned by this change in the group’s direction. Flying in the face of a slew of glowing notices for ‘Relax’ elsewhere, the influential site gave the record a negative review. Did Suri care? “I care about (bad reviews) in so much as they affect me,” he says. “Like, if I could compare Pitchfork scores and how much a band made in a year based on that album and how it was reviewed, I'd be interested in seeing how that works out. I only give a shit about how much less money it puts in my pocket.”

The review certainly hasn’t had an impact on attendance at their shambolic live shows, which continue to be attended by a majority of white hipster kids. Considering the group’s focus on life as ‘brown’ men in 2011 (Suri and Kondabolu are Indian; Vazquez is half-black), how does that sit with them? “It's probably the same at a Dead Prez show,” Suri counters, “and they're more militant than us… It's just what rap is. When I was a 16-year-old kid, I wasn't going to spend 16 dollars to go to a rap show. That's some dumb shit, you know?

“Besides brown people, we just speak to people our age; people who are experiencing what we're experiencing at the same time as us. We're taking that in and putting it on the record. We're just trying to make sense of shit, just like anybody else. It's not like we 'get it' and we're playing some big trick. We're just trying to figure shit out, too.”

Das Racist play the Big Day Out at Gold Coast Parklands on Sunday January 22 and The Zoo on Tuesday January 24. bigdayout.com