What does the future look like for former members of a joke-rap group? What if things blew apart just as you stopped joking? Das Racist’s career arc was never an obvious one—sometimes it was hard to tell if they were shrugging or lunging at us—and its solo members are now puzzling their way through the aftermath of an ambiguous legacy. Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, always felt like the breakout star, if the crew had such a thing. They were all funny, but Heems was also quietly charismatic and occasionally vulnerable: On Das Racist tracks like "Amazing" or "You Can Sell Anything", he was all three at once. Eat Pray Thug, Heems’ new solo album, finds him summoning all of these qualities, some of the time, but the album as a whole isn’t vivid or well-realized enough to banish the sense that something is missing.
Heems has said in interviews that Eat Pray Thug is his most personal project. A handful of songs draw directly on his experiences as an Indian-American in a post–9/11 world, and they are sharply observed, painful, emotional, and deeply quotable. On "Flag Shopping", he offers vivid images in a halting, tom-roll cadence: "Your dad mad, cuz he lost all clients/ Dad, why you crying? I thought that we had the spirit of the lion/ He take it out on you, his belt big like Orion’s." On the album closer "Patriot Act", he adopts a short, bellowing delivery, nicked from Rick Ross at his imaginary-crime-boss peak, to spit a tangle of contradictions: "Product of Partition/ Dripped in Prada for the stitchin', proud of superstitions/ Got powder in the kitchen." Heems talked to the New York Times about his desire to reclaim rap language from the inside, and songs like "Patriot Act" show him doing just that, applying a lifelong love of hip-hop to the gritty particulars of a specific life.
Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona. "Sometimes", the opening track, produced by longtime collaborator Gordon Voidwell, is about "dualities," as the rapper told both NPR and the Times, but here is an example of how that plays out in the song: "Sometimes I’m like this, sometimes I’m like that/ Sometimes I’m pretty thin, sometimes I’m pretty fat." Tossed-off lines like these lack the smart-dumb zing of his Das Racist writing or, really, any zing at all. Heems drones the word "clarity, clarity" for a few bars on the song, then deadpans: "Sometimes I write hard, sometimes I’m mad lazy/ I just repeat words like ‘clarity,’ fucking crazy." It’s DOA as a punchline, and reminds me of Encore-era Eminem, where he’d fill up entire verses with the lamest jokes he could think of simply because he could.
The most uncomfortable moments on Eat Pray Thug are like this, watching a guy try for ironic laughs and failing, and they feel like unwelcome holdovers from Heems’ previous life. Wordplay like "The great gats be the TEC-9 and AK" (from "Hubba Hubba") only remind us how good he used to be at this sort of high/low culture switch-up. "Made enough friends, like I play in the Wrens," he raps on "Sometimes", and as one of the people who actually gets that joke, I find myself unaccountably saddened that it exists outside of a chat window.
Elsewhere, Heems reaches for styles that are simply beyond his grasp as a musician. "Pop Song (Games)", "Damn, Girl", and "Home" are stabs at accessibility that fail for a more prosaic and difficult-to-circumvent reason: Heems’ voice. Landing somewhere between pained groan and mocking whine, it lacks expressive range, and it points to the biggest problem facing Heems and his fellow former members: They were, from the beginning, a fragile musical equation. None of them were naturally appealing on the mic, but the three of them together, projecting camaraderie, sent a specific message: We might not be very good at this, but we’re way better at it than you realize. They hung together, in a hangdog sort of way.
Without that camaraderie, a lot of those obvious flaws, which were built into the DNA of the group, float to the surface, and 11 tracks of solo Heems proves to be a lot to take. Together, they were a bunch of bored, antic college kids, smarter than they seemed and maybe, sneakily, smarter than everyone you knew, masking some complex feelings behind jokes. Alone, they are three adult post-wiseasses, in search of a story as good as their last one.
