The idea that Heems should need to prove his rap credentials to anyone is absurd. As one third of late-aughts/early-2010s alt-rap deconstructionists Das Racist, the Queens-born, Punjabi American rapper helped redefine hip-hop for the internet era, combining incisive, hyper-literate commentary on race, rap, and identity politics with irreverent jokes about smoking weed and George Costanza’s penis. After the group’s dissolution in 2012, he showed he could also be sincere and emotionally vulnerable, documenting the trauma of the post-9/11 years on 2015 solo album Eat Pray Thug. His last full-length—Swet Shop Boys’ 2016 album Cashmere—was a landmark of code-switching diaspora rap that bridged the gap between Queens, Hackney, and Delhi’s Chandni Chowk.
But throughout his career, Heems has struggled with the labels—joke-rapper, hipster, the Indian guy—that have been forced onto him, fuelling the perception that this working-class Queens native who grew up on Nas and the Lost Boyz was somehow an outsider to hip-hop. “The worst rapper on this track, third coolest,” he rapped on Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire’s “The Last Huzzah!,” a sardonic riposte to haters that nonetheless hinted at a little insecurity. On the Lapgan-produced LAFANDAR, his first release in six years, a re-energized Heems sets out to finally put those doubts at rest. “I really wanted to make a real rappy-rap album,” he said in a recent interview. “So I could once and for all finish the ‘can he rap?’ conversation.”
On that front, LAFANDAR delivers. This is the sharpest Heems has sounded in a minute, dishing out tongue-twisting quotables in rhyme after rhyme, all delivered with his signature nonchalant swagger. There’s a focus to his writing here that has eluded him on earlier solo outings. All the glorious messiness and anything-can-happen eclecticism of Das Racist and his early solo work on Nehru Jackets and Wild Water Kingdom is still present, but there’s precious little of the erratic non-sequiturs and self-indulgent irony that bogged down parts of Eat Pray Thug (he’s not repeating the word “clarity” like a broken record and passing it off as a bar anymore).
“My dough nuts, ich bin ein Berliner,” he raps on “I’m Pretty Cool,” referencing Kennedy’s classic anti-Communist speech (and a classic German jelly donut) in service of a gleefully juvenile wisecrack that’s classic Das Racist. On “Kala Tika,” he takes the very Indian trait of mixing up our “v”s and “w”s and runs with it, effortlessly switching syllables to hilarious—and hypnotic—effect. There’s a sinister timbre to his voice on the coke-rap-adjacent South Asian posse cut “Going for 6” (featuring Sonnyjim and Abhi the Nomad) that oozes cartoonish menace, a version of Heems you wouldn’t want to run into on a dark street. The record’s diverse collaborators—ranging from Sir Michael Rocks and Cool Calm Pete to Saul Williams and Fatboi Sharif—all bring their A-game, and Heems is at his most inventive when trading bars with his fellow emcees. His chemistry with Your Old Droog is palpable on “Sri Lanka,” where he plays the wise-cracking smart aleck to Droog’s broody boom-bap drawl. Elsewhere, on “Obi Toppin,” he sounds thrilled at sharing a track with an early idol. “Yo check me out I got a song with Kool Keith,” he declares over a mangled soul sample, and you can’t help but smile at this charmingly guileless humblebrag.
Heems’ dense verses touch on everything from the trauma of America’s forever wars to anti-immigrant xenophobia and post-colonial schadenfreude (“Fuck the queen, white woman with my nani jewelry”), but the most thrilling lines are the ones that feature his distinctive brand of hyper-referential code-switching. Signifiers of his Indian heritage (lassi, Sufi poets, the Bollywood film Pyaasa) sit in easygoing camaraderie with New York name-drops (Canal Street, former Knicks power forward Obi Toppin), as Heems celebrates the kaleidoscopic diversity of his many, many roots.
In Lapgan, Heems has found a like-minded cultural magpie. On his last album, History—the first release on Heems’ label Veena—the Chicago producer stitched together samples from South Asian film and folk music with classic hip-hop instrumentation. Given the opportunity to work with a musical idol—he cites Nehru Jackets as a key influence—Lapgan goes all in, sampling not just obscure records from South Asia (such as a flip of a lullaby from a 1982 Tamil film), but also Levantine folk and English post-punk to create beats every bit as eclectic as Heems’ bars. Lapgan’s production positions LAFANDAR as a spiritual successor to Bollywood-sampling hip-hop classics like Madlib’s Beat Konducta, Vol. 3 & 4: In India and Dan the Automator’s Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars & Sitars. Only this time, it’s the brown guys in charge.
Beyond all the high-minded narratives about identity and multiculturalism, LAFANDAR is a record about rediscovering the pure joy of rapping—the sheer thrill of bending words around a beat with skill, style, and a wicked sense of humor. After all that Heems has endured over his 15-year career—the divisive backlash to Das Racist, label troubles, struggles with mental health and addiction—he’s happy just to still be here, rocking up to the mic, rhyming Assata with enchiladas. It’s one of hip-hop’s smartest, zaniest oddballs taking a long overdue victory lap for having outrun all the shit that was keeping him down. And it’s definitive proof that Heems is, as he once declared on “Michael Jackson,” “fucking great at rapping.”
