The New Music

It’s pretty hard to take a band seriously when their hit song repeats “I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” throughout the entire track. But, if you dig a bit deeper, Brooklyn based rap group Das Racist is actually more than just dudes goofing off. An entertaining and sometimes provocative social commentary, their first mixtape, Shut Up, Dude, simultaneously destroys and celebrates hip hop.

Group members Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez released the mix-tape as a free download in March of 2010. The pair parody themselves, deconstructing aspects of rap and hip hop without being too pretentious about it. Standout tracks like “You Oughta Know” and “Fake Patois” stand on their own as good songs, despite the wisecracks.

Even so, seemingly ridiculous songs are abundant throughout. Other hits feature hard-pressing issues such as White Castle (“Rainbow in the Dark”), people eating bacon all across the nation (“Chicken and Meat”) and drinking beer (“Ek Shaneesh”). Elaborate pop culture references and jokes aside, the subject matter isn’t exactly trivial. Shut Up, Dude holds some artistic merit when you look past the Hannah Montana and Google Chat references. “Nutmeg”, for example, sounds like it could be a Lil Wayne or Jay-Z song at points. And for a little street cred, Death & Taxes magazine describe the recursive “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” as “an existential meditation on consumer identity in corporate America.”

It’s possible that Das Racist is fooling every one. Maybe the tracks on Shut Up Dude are sharp social satire or maybe it is just plain college humor. At this point, it seems irrelevant when it sounds this good. Shut Up Dude has got catchy and memorable rhymes and danceable beats, and that’s enough for me.