Five years ago, when the words "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" were taking root in the pop-culture consciousness, the last thing you might have expected from the people responsible was staying power. As it turned out, Das Racist was holding another card; with hip-hop as a medium and humor as a catalyst, the Brooklyn duo vaulted past its viral hit and into one of the more unusual and provocative careers in recent music history. There was much to put in context, beginning with the name. But in the course of three albums, a few clear themes emerged: an embrace of complexity, a rejection of media narratives around rap music and a knack for pointing out the absurd, especially when it came to America's conversation about race.
By the time Himanshu "Heems" Suri met his Das Racist co-founder, Victor Vazquez, at Wesleyan University, he'd been thinking hard about race and perception for years. The son of Indian immigrants, he had grown up code-switching, speaking one cultural language in the South Asian community that surrounded his parents' home in Queens, N.Y., and another at the prestigious public high school he attended in downtown Manhattan. He was at school when the Sept. 11 attacks demolished the World Trade Center, and watched the disaster unfold with his classmates from blocks away. The weeks and months that followed that event, in which certain American minorities found themselves targets of a new kind of hostility, made an impression on Heems â and, he says, came rushing back to mind after Das Racist parted ways in late 2012.
Heems spoke with Morning Edition on the occasion of his new solo album, Eat Pray Thug -- a set of songs recorded mostly in India, which focus on life in post-Sept. 11 America. In an extended interview with David Greene, he touches on the factors that led to the end of Das Racist and the challenges of working with a label after a career built on Internet mixtapes, and offers some of his own opinions on politics after a year in which racial conflict and controversy seemed to never leave the headlines. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.
http://radio.wpsu.org/post/we-...ap-race-and-identity
By the time Himanshu "Heems" Suri met his Das Racist co-founder, Victor Vazquez, at Wesleyan University, he'd been thinking hard about race and perception for years. The son of Indian immigrants, he had grown up code-switching, speaking one cultural language in the South Asian community that surrounded his parents' home in Queens, N.Y., and another at the prestigious public high school he attended in downtown Manhattan. He was at school when the Sept. 11 attacks demolished the World Trade Center, and watched the disaster unfold with his classmates from blocks away. The weeks and months that followed that event, in which certain American minorities found themselves targets of a new kind of hostility, made an impression on Heems â and, he says, came rushing back to mind after Das Racist parted ways in late 2012.
Heems spoke with Morning Edition on the occasion of his new solo album, Eat Pray Thug -- a set of songs recorded mostly in India, which focus on life in post-Sept. 11 America. In an extended interview with David Greene, he touches on the factors that led to the end of Das Racist and the challenges of working with a label after a career built on Internet mixtapes, and offers some of his own opinions on politics after a year in which racial conflict and controversy seemed to never leave the headlines. Hear the radio version at the audio link, and read more of their conversation below.
http://radio.wpsu.org/post/we-...ap-race-and-identity