"These zooted brown weirdos is wildin' but they can really rap/ Saw the cover of the tape, figured it's pretty wack/ Later on eventually admitted that it's pretty crack." That's one of the most pedestrian lyrics on the dense, witty, complex Sit Down, Man but it's a good summary of the 180-degree turn Das Racist have pulled in 2010. Sure, plenty of people liked "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", but when you lead with a presumed novelty song, the bar for your career tends to be set pretty low. But the trio followed that with the slept-on Shut Up, Dude mixtape and all of a sudden lowbrow humor gives way to subversive social commentary and a culturally literate wit that was too hilarious to immediately draw attention to how really fucking smart it was.
Judging by *Sit Down, Man'*s impressive production roster, a lot of fellow artists embraced the Shut Up mixtape. The sheer variety and quality of those producers aren't just important co-signs, however; they provide a context for Das Racist to bring their best. It also opens them up to the fruits of collaboration and, over 80 minutes, diversifies their sound. Despite the range of collaborators, Das Racist never have to break character, whether going abstract and abrasive with El-P, bareknuckle street brawling with Roc Marciano, counting major label young money with Boi-1da, or canoodling to Teengirl Fantasy's wobbly R&B.
The stars of the show though are clearly MCs Kool A.D. and Heems, who here blow their previous work out of the water. Heems told The Village Voice he chooses beats "so Talib Kweli fans wouldn't like it," but while Das Racist go great lengths to separate themselves from the pejorative connotations of "lyrical hip-hop," the main draw are the lyrics. Das Racist turn rap into Calvinball, making and breaking the ground rules with no warning whatsoever: One moment, they'll be calling Mobb Deep's Prodigy "more Picasso than Schnabel," and the next they'll be doing cold-rock-a-party Q&A-- "you puff herb?" "Dog, I smoke weed too!" Or, in what I guess could be a one-line summary of Das Racist's mindset: "I'm counting Jacksons with black friends/ I'm counting tens in Benzes with white friends/ Wonderin' if suicide's a largely white trend/ Google it later and confirm that, aight then."
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. In that sense, Das Racist's music feels closer to Girl Talk's than any other current rapper.
Das Racist could stand accused of sinking into trivia as a means of obscuring a certain sort of modern emptiness, but in between all the proper nouns are some disarmingly humane moments. The Brooklyn group Keepaway lends "Amazing" a sparkly, champagne-spilling luxury as Heems gives a tender, relatable treatise on the effects of soft substance abuse. Though he notes that fan interaction tends to be way friendlier when you rap about weed, he reminisces about a youth of "Yo! MTV Raps" cards and Nautica sweatshirts and realizes "we used to play basketball, then we started drinking." Meanwhile, on the Diplo-produced "You Can Sell Anything", A.D. bemusedly imagines a record exec thinking, "maybe we can cake off the weirdos," while Heems kicks a bravely honest and timely verse where he "celebrate[s] the fact I moved back into my mom's basement," seeing the bright side of having no rent and the freedom to "sell old books for new ones," do shows, and hang with guys like Diplo.
And yet, although the upgrade in production and increased confidence in their lyrics are certainly a big part of Sit Down, Man, the most important growth for Das Racist is that they're learning how to write songs instead of just rap for four minutes at a time. Most people who've enjoyed Das Racist to this point probably wouldn't mind if they stuck with the latter, but for people who don't share their encyclopedic knowledge of turn-of-the-century mainstream rap, the sheer density of that would understandably be exhausting. Sit Down, Man works every bit as well in a house party as it does for a solitary geek-out session: the coked-out couture-rap of "Fashion Party" shows surprisingly easy chemistry with indie mystics Chairlift and should be appreciated by anyone who's ever felt odd at a gallery event but enjoyed the free booze. And while there's plenty of recognizable interpolations (Jay-Z's "Run This Town", "Days of Our Lives", the Very Best's "Julia", "We Are Family", "People Are Strange", "Addams Groove"), perhaps the best is where they feed Enigma a couple of Irish car bombs and turn "Return to Innocence" into a drunken singalong.
Some may still resist embracing Das Racist, but I imagine it's not so much a matter of race or privilege, though they do have a lot of fun playing with those two issues. It's more reflected in their hook from "hahahaha jk?"-- "we're not joking, just joking, we are joking, just joking, we're not joking." It's always difficult to convince someone that a rapper's the real deal with "they're really funny" as the selling point, since it gives the impression that neither you nor the artist appreciates the daunting cultural import of hip-hop. It's the same reason a lot of us would reserve a circle of hell for "comedy rappers," who figure that the mere medium of rapping is funny and let that do the heavy lifting. That's not how Das Racist roll: They kid because they are deeply and madly in love with hip-hop, and Sit Down, Man is an infinitely entertaining result of extreme reverence toward rap and irreverence toward everything else, themselves included.
