The Live Music Show - Das Racist

THE NEW YORK TIMES
…Their sloppiness is a mask for detailed, affectionate hip-hop parody, name-dropping KRS-One and Asher Roth as easily as W.E.B. Du Bois and the literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak… a blend that inspires questions like this one in a recent interview in the Village Voice: “Is this a joke that everyone thinks is a graduate thesis, or vice versa?” …Das Racist’s lack of piety has become an aesthetic of its own, with songs that are as much commentary on hip hop as rigorous practice of it.

PITCHFORK
There’s precedent in the hyper-referential raps of Beastie Boys and MF Doom as well as the abstract-gone-mainstream wordplay of Dipset and Lil Wayne, but Das Racist are a singular act. Google and Wikipedia get several shoutouts, and it makes sense since everything under the sun is fair game for these guys, but they never rhyme for the sake of riddlin’. The lyrics themselves have an orderly and logical nature about them, pop culture crosswords that draw connections between completely unrelated objects. Listening to their music doesn’t require deep cultural or musical knowledge to enjoy it– it’s pretty damn enjoyable purely as pop– but you’ll get more of a charge from it the more often you decode it.

THE NEW YORKER
You could call them hip-hop punks. But all the tools required to rattle people are already inside the genre; there just aren’t that many rappers waving their box cutters around so freely...  This kind of dumb fun is an appropriate supplement to what Das Racist describes as its “deconstructionalist” approach. If the band members want you to think about the ways that skin color can affect consciousness, they also don’t mind if you go ahead and party. They rap over a variety of tracks, mostly made by producers outside the group, and the music is rarely difficult or abrasive.

Videos, Downloads, etc:

http://dasracist.net