Das Racist Relax

Oh, Das Racist. How excitedly I anticipated the release of Relax, and how I looked forward to giving it a rave review. I’d replayed infinitely your outstanding mixtapes Shut Up Dude and Sit Down Man, and I’d already mentally composed half of this review based solely on that amazing work from last year. It seems a shame to discard those sentiments, so here’s the gist of what I wanted to say about the polished, album-length version of those mixtape sketches.

“Das Racist are important because they’re the funniest, most thought-provoking, and most original hip-hop group in years. You might have had them down as weed-rap slackers, making cheap shots at pop culture over party-rap beats – but Das Racist, in spite of this laid-back façade, aim for nothing less than to deconstruct the racial politics of America, satirising media depictions of race relations and particularly the invisibility and misunderstanding of ‘brown people’ (Himanshu Suri (Heems) is Indian, Victor Vazquez (Kool A.D.) is of Italian/Cuban descent) in pop culture; and they cover a whole lot more socio-political ground while they’re at it."

Sadly, I can’t really continue like this, as much as I’d love to. At their former finest moments, Das Racist fulfilled all that praise and more, and their music was so effortlessly fun. Even at its best, Relax is lacking in that same ambition. They sometimes touch upon socio-political themes, but their lyrics are nowhere near as quotable as on their mixtapes. I found myself re-listening to Relax wondering when I’d “get it”.

In fact I began wondering if it was cooked up as a sort of musical Sokal Hoax (that it’s intentionally meaningless in an attempt to trick critics), because it’s frequently such a damned annoying, frustratingly vapid thing to listen to. Would I be lured in to reviewing this positively just because Das Racist are so likeable, and because they used to be so great?

But I can’t enjoy it. It’s full of the most irritating hooks: from the inscrutability of Middle of the Cake to the tedium of The Trick (not helped by Rostam Batmanglij’s turn as producer), Das Racist invest way too much of their songs in unremarkable stabs at commercialism (apparently). This is in spite of mocking commercialist hip-hop on Brand New Dance – “It’s a brand new dance, give us all your money / Everybody love everybody” – this hook is a parody uncharacteristically devoid of humour, and sadly it’s representative of the album as a whole. In retrospect, the mixtapes weren’t exactly consistent: at first I couldn’t figure out how a track like Girl ended up on Relax, but I realised it’s pretty much a rehash of Coochie Dip City: replace the Finnegans Wake reference with Infinite Jest and change the melody slightly and it’s pretty much the same song, a lesser reworking of one of Das Racist’s most forgettable moments. It’s hook-heavy songs like this, along with Booty in the Air and Celebration, which leave me wondering whether it’s that Das Racist have no quality control, or if they’re just taking the piss.

Or maybe they’ve smoked too many laced joints. Heems and Kool A.D. spit a couple of great verses on opener Relax, which sets up their distinct personalities (although the track flips an audial middle finger at you by closing with 60 seconds of autotuned stoned laughter). A couple of remnants of what could have been remain – an almost ill-fitting standout line on Power is Vazquez’s clever analogy for the people’s reactions to Das Racist: “If somebody felled an old tree jokingly and only three people got the joke - Is the tree pine, maple, or oak, or other?” But elsewhere there’s little to comment on; there’s not much in their verses that’s dreadful – the problem is it isn’t memorable.

The production is inconsistent and largely a bit too bombastic for Das Racist’s usually free-associative, untechnical rapping; Heems in particular ups his game on many tracks and resultantly sounds mildly possessed, while Vazquez often struggles to keep up. It’s weird because Das Racist are so lazy, often leaving in botched takes of verses in the final mix (Selena, Brand New Dance). On Shut Up, Man, they fail to match up to El-P’s guest spot, and they’re also out-rapped by newcomer Danny Brown on Power, who shows up the direction they’ve taken (he sounds like he’s never heard a Das Racist song).

But oddly, they chose to include Rainbow in the Dark, the one song recycled from the mixtapes (and therefore the highlight); its inclusion emphasises everything that’s wrong about Relax. For one thing, there’s no hook, and a roomier beat, which allows Heems and Kool A.D. to concisely trade verses which flow into each other wonderfully, and which are frequently laugh-out-loud funny. The only lolz I got from the rest of the album was Heems’ now oft-quoted outburst in Michael Jackson – “I’m fucking great at rappiiiiing!”

Those mixtapes are still free, and still essential listening, but Relax is such a step backwards. Perhaps the duo became embarrassed at their socio-political themes, or perhaps they decided to tone it down in favour of selling more records. Whereas once Das Racist wrote Ek Shaneesh, a song hilariously juxtaposing postcolonial literature and critical theory with apathetic 21st-century slackerism, it says it all that Relax contains a song called Booty in the Air.