On Thursday night, I went to see Das Racist, noted joke/rap/farcical/over-educated/serious/clownfart/deadpan/funny-funzo’s dumbest of the dumb-dumb/absurdist and epicurean/drunk/willfully obtuse/high-and-low/trash/fringe artists. It was the most idiotic and enjoyable show of CMJ!
People Under The Stairway To Heaven
Constantly creating meta self-aware moments — like forcing a crowd of white people to chant “WHITE PEEOPPPLLLE” – can either be annoying or delightful, depending on how clever you fancy yourself. Das Racist fancies itself to be clever. In fact, they are, to a large extent, but not always. This is of course the curse of the Wesleyan grad.
To Das Racist, the Wesleyan leash must seem suffocating. Many have already balked at calling Wesleyan an “art college” (it is neither an art school nor a college), but at the same time the group’s association with MGMT (another set of Wesleyan grads) sure hasn’t hurt group’s press any, nor has having the wonderful but clearly one-note joke name Das Racist for a duo comprised of a Spanish guy and Desi guy.
And as a fellow Wesleyanite myself (go Cards/fight till the end/when might and right, etc.), I can safely say that the school prides itself on exposing its students to completely disparate people/media/philosophies/meal plans, and gleefully encourages mashing these elements together to create something new — grotesque or sublime or otherwise. In the case of Das Racist, it is the blending of trash culture with privileged over-education: juxtaposing Juelz Santana with Carlos Santana, mocking the chorus for Chairlifts’ iPod song “I tried to do handstands for y’aaaalllll” (whether or not you get the reference is irrelevent because even if you don’t, they’ve already leapfrogged to the next joke), and repeating and recontextualizing and free-associating everything they’ve already said to the point that it doesn’t make sense anymore, like this sentence.
Unfortunately if you can’t hear the lyrics, very little of this translates into a live show. Amidst the deafening and endlessly overused airhorns (irony?) and crowd-surfing micstand (irony!), Victor Vazquez and Himanshu Suri command the stage with a drunken urgency that is somehow both feral and bored. Throughout all of this, they stumble and bumble their way through very catchy and bon mot-laden anti-raps, rife with references to the Modern Lovers, Cypress Hill, Speedy Gonzalez, and [insert name of philosopher/playwright/civil rights crusader here].
Hats Off To HannuChaka Khan
Songs are started and aborted and started again by a DJ who seems as unnecessary as the third MC and various other yabbos who also joined the duo throughout the set. With no structure, the performance was a sh*tshow of yelling the same words at the same time, dance breaks, and willfully surreal audience baiting. The conclusion of the show, during which Das Racist played Alphaville’s “Forever Young” (the maudlin, un-dancey version) and stagily dance-walked their way off stage, is reminiscent of the way the Notorious MSG ended their equally ridiculous sets by tearing off their tracksuits and flexing suggestively over shrill dog-and-pony show music.
People Let Me Get This Off My Chest In The Line Of Fire With Your Thin Ass Vest
Every Little Step I Take On Me
The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get It Together, See What's Happening
Francis And The Flashing Lights Lights Lights
Down By Lawd Have Mercy
Velvet Undergroundhog Day
The question for Das Racist then becomes whether or not they can surpass the gift/curse of their exercise in deconstruction/viral online views-accumulator “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”
As an audience member I can honestly say there was a moment of meaningless yet potent anxiety as to whether they would even perform it. The “will they? won’t they?” aspect seemed to lean towards the latter, as I’m sure Das Racist has no desire fall down Superdrag’s “Who Sucked Out The Feeeeeeeeling” rabbit hole of playing a novelty well past its prime (File under: They Might Be Giants).
More importantly, how do you expand on a joke that is derived from a YouTube clip, whose punchline you get in the first 20 seconds, which has already been somehow expanded into a 3 minute song? Obviously you cannot. Performing “Taco Bell” live would have been useless and deflating, and ultimately would have robbed the original video of its charm.
In the original YouTube version, “Taco Bell”‘s strength lies in repetition rendering the eponymous phrase absurd, and repeating repeating repeating it until the absurd becomes transcendent, which you don’t realize until you’re in the middle of listening to it for the first time. In the live show, we realize how little the lyrics matter — the same ripostes and excessive verbiage that characterize Das Racist’s other songs and make you realize they are not in fact dumb-dumbs — are the same words that are conspicuously absent in “Taco Bell”. That is to say, lyrics don’t matter until they do.
When Taco Bell gratifyingly, inevitably begins its Armageddon synth opening, the new live lyrics evolve thusly:
I’m at the Pizza Hut. I’m at the Taco Bell. I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. (repeat 3x so we’re all on the same page)
I’m at the Baskin Robbins. I’m at the Dunkin Donuts. I’m at the combination Baskin Robbins Dunkin Donuts.
I’m at the Fedex Store. I’m at the Kinko’s Store. I’m at the combination Fedex store and Kinko’s store.
It was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was the combination best of times and worst of times.
The imaginary leap from chain stores to Dickens was, again, transcendent. Achieving a new layer of revelatory irony from an already preposterous premise made the other bush league antics of the Das Racist show irrelevant, because it succeeded in justifying (at least momentarily) the group’s cleverness in a way that had been hitherto lacking. The group freed itself from its own chains using its own rules: lyrics matter until they don’t matter, and when words don’t matter, you can say whatever you want:
I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. I’m at the combination Baskin Robbins Dunkin Donuts. I’m at the combination combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and combination Baskin Robbins Dunkin Donuts.
I was mildly impressed. I was consistently entertained. I was the combination mildly impressed and consistently entertained.
It was a good review. It was a bad review. It was a combination good review and bad review.
*Next! Our unedited video anti-interview with Das Racist, delivered by proxy, teeming in Wesleyan references that no one will get except for Wesleyan grads!
