“Westco. Butt B. Anthony Braxton. The Argus. The Ampersand. If these words mean anything at all to you, you probably attended Wesleyan University in grim, grim Middeltown, Connecticut. You know who else did? The “weed-edge/hare krishna hard-core/art-rap/freak folk” duo Das Racist. We sat the MCs of our favorite hip hop group down and asked them the tough, tough questions about their alma mater. We ran out of time before they could sing the school fight song, but if you’re even watching that far into the video, you already know the song by heart. 06459 in the house!”

Das Racist Uncensored Interview
Das Racist

Thanks shoutbox commenter for the tip!

I did a thorough eye-roll when I saw this publicity email in the Wesleying inbox today:

Hey!

My name is Leo and am currently interning for MTV Iggy. In short, MTV Iggy is a new, cutting-edge MTV brand focused on breakthrough music and pop-culture around the globe.

Recently we did a spotlight on Das Racist, the WEED EDGE/HARE KRISHNA HARD CORE/ART RAP/FREAK FOLK music trio based in Brooklyn, NY. Some of this content includes, but is not limited to:

- Two never-before heard tracks
- A comic of us explaining the group to our mom
- Interviews
- Slideshows
- and some more fun stuff

Kudos for trying to woo avid readers of the Pitchfork.com, MTV Iggy! Good luck monetizing internet onlookers with an ironic sensibility.

I do have to compliment them for doing their research and seeing that the student blog from the band’s alma mater is a potentially rich source for publicity. But do they really have to SHOUT those dubious genres at us? I also highly doubt that they all have the same mom. That said, their comic was kinda funny.

Speaking of hipsters on the internet, Pitchfork recently ran a short review of the last 20 minutes of a Das Racist set that a SXSW reviewer “was forced to suffer through.” She mentioned that they changed around the lyrics of “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” to “reference Baskin-Robbins/Dunkin’ Donuts, FedEx/Kinko’s, and ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’” Even she had to admit it was kind of funny.

The lineup consists of Wesleyan DJs Ian Johnson and Harrison Schaff, live performer and seriously durrrty rapper Khalif Diouf (aka Leif), as well as Das Racist.

Based out of Brooklyn, Das Racist is composed of Wesleyan alumni Himanshu Suri and Victor Vazquez. They first gained mainstream attention with the song “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Since then, Das Racist has been featured in Pitchfork Media, XLR8R magazine, The Village Voice, The Guardian, and The New Yorker, just to name a few. On January 19th, they headlined Highline Ballroom in New York City. It’s also rumored that Fox News will be doing a write-up about the show on Friday night.

WHEN: Friday, February 12.
Set times: Yea Mann:
9:00-11:00
Harrison Schaaf:
11:00 – 12:15
LE1F:
12:15 – 1:00
Das Racist:
1:00 – 3:00
COST: $7, Tickets on sale at Usdan

A newish video is out for “Rainbow in the Dark”, a track that uses fast food (via White Castle) only as a jump-off point and is more indicative of what they’re about. Some rap exegesis might be in order to figure out what it means, but at the very least it transcends the inanity of that previous offering.

Be awed by the viscous lyrical delivery and hyperliterate rhymes, as self-aware but un-self-conscious as ever. With references to NMH’s Jeff Mangum, fancy cheeses, T-Pain, Stephen Hawking, Don King, Gary Soto, themselves, the Harold and Kumar sequel, and various Internet communications technologies delivered in a cannabinoid stream over the course of four minutes.

Bonus points for “Wikipedia Brown,” and this line:

“peep us at the Grammys, we’d like to thank G-Chat”

Mostly SFW, although be wary of Victor’s pubes if that’s a problem. Directed by Jordan Fish ‘06:

Everything in the video is Wesleyan, and it is hilarious. Directed by Ray Tintori ‘06, filmed on campus and in Middletown, groupie love from Eclectic women, Leif as the Pope, Das Racist eating string beans, Genevieve Angelson in clips from the other D2D video, fucking with cultural notions of masculinity, a group jump shot at Indian Hill, ghostriding under the bridge to Portland, a giant pack of cigarettes rollerblading down from Russell House.

Watch it before it gets taken down or something:

More Boy Crisis:

Boy Crisis on Wesleying
“Fountain of Youth” video
MySpace

Well, DR’s Victor Vazquez ‘08 was not amused. Or, was amused enough to challenge cartoonist Farley Katz to a cartoon duel:

Dear Farley Katz,

While I appreciate you taking the time to blog about our viral art-rap song, I’m sorry to say your journalistic approach lacked vigor. When referring to our alma mater, you mentioned “the dean of Wesleyan’s twin monocles,” when it is a highly-publicized fact that Dean Charles Peyton Randolph Cottonbaron has three monocles. I have no idea how this got past the fact checkers. This is lazy journalism, pure and simple. I notice you’re a cartoonist and a gentleman with a history of dueling. I challenge you to a cartoon-off.

Signed,
Victor Vazquez

The challenge? Each combatant drew a day in the life of a rapper, a day in the life of a cartoonist, and a futuristic utopia where racism does not exist.

You be the judge:

Vazquez draws a futuristic utopia where racism doesn't exist.

Katz draws a futuristic utopia where racism doesn't exist.

See the rest at the Cartoon Lounge.

New Yorker: Cartoon-Off: Das Racist

The notoriety enjoyed by the Wallpaper remix of  “Pizza Hut Taco Bell” this summer prompted the New Yorker blog to investigate the many combination businesses that exist in New York City:

Wesleyan is a fancy university in the élite Northeast. It is so fancy, the school used its power to create a law prohibiting fast-food restaurants from coexisting on campus—such a combination is looked down upon as something, say, a Middlebury student might enjoy. So, when Wesleyan-born rap duo Das Racist graduated and moved to Brooklyn, they were so shocked by a store that contained both a Pizza Hut and a Taco Bell, they were forced to write this rap song about it and then sing it into YouTube.

Ha. Ha ha. Please, fancy New Yorker, tell us more about being so fancy and elite.

In contrast to the breathless hype of last year’s NME feature, this one is grounded and pretty accurate in describing the loosely associated group of Wes-to-Brooklyn artists we’ve come to blog and love over the past few years.

The Village Voice interviewed key members like Simon O’Connor of Amazing Baby, Ben Goldwasser of MGMT, Tal Rozen of Boy Crisis, and associate/film director Ray Tintori, who discuss their relationships to Wesleyan, Eclectic, and each other:

[Wesleyan's] never been known as a particularly “cool” place until now. And if it seems wrong for a tiny, nerdy Connecticut college to be the focus of so much hype, well, blame the British. The music press over there is obsessed with Brooklyn bands, and MGMT’s collegiate circle is obviously irresistible[...] Boy Crisis’s U.K. publicist advertises them as having attended “Connecticut’s prestigious Wesleyan Art College,” a blatant attempt to make it sound somehow fashionable.

That sort of thing drives O’Connor nuts. “It’s not a fucking art college,” he says flatly. “I made the mistake of telling an NME writer that Will (Berman) had left our band to join MGMT, and that was it. We were labeled a Wesleyan band.” O’Connor is currently the only member of his band who attended the school, and he doesn’t think the experience was anything special. “Yeah, we played in bands together,” he says, “but we were music majors. That’s just what you do.” O’Connor and VanWyngarden had a band called Irma Vep that once opened for the Rapture at the Eclectic Society, another institution O’Connor is quick to denounce: “It was exactly like that movie PCU,” he says. “A nerd society, basically.”

MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser was a member of Eclectic, and though he admits he thought of the club as lousy with “hipster assholes” at first, he warmed up to the idea when his friends joined. “I liked being involved in running a performance venue,” he says. “We had the best room on campus for bands to play.” As for Wesleyan overall, Goldwasser disagrees with O’Connor about the experience. “There was definitely something about it,” he says. “There was the usual college drinking/party atmosphere, but people also took initiative to put on creative events. There were bands playing really cool shows on campus”—MGMT among them.

Conversely, Boy Crisis didn’t perform much while at school, and Das Racist and Amazing Baby formed post-college in New York, but the core Wesleyan crowd stayed friends, which won them all extra attention once MGMT blew up. “In some cases, we’ve tried to get their names out there and make people aware of them,” says Goldwasser. “But once we started getting attention, people just automatically started looking at bands we were friends with and bands that came from Wesleyan.”

Also mentioned are Max Goldblatt, the choreographer for many of Tintori’s videos, current student/DJ/producer Leif, Das Racist, and Francis and the Lights.

Like that other Wes entertainment syndicate, the current crop of Wes-related artists is dubbed the “Wesleyan mafia”:

“It’s like a ladder,” [Tintori] says. “When somebody moves up a rung, they reach a hand down to the next guy.” It’s the kind of career mechanism a lot of people would love to latch on to, and Goldblatt suspects they’re already trying. “There must be tons of kids in neon Wayfarers writing wild, psychedelic essays to get into Wesleyan now,” he says. The frightening thing is, he’s probably right.

Looking at you, class of 2013!

Read the whole article:

Village Voice: The Wesleyan Mafia: MGMT, Boy Crisis, Amazing Baby

Check it out:

During a news conference on Wednesday night, President Obama stood up for the prominent African-American Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who had recently been arrested by a white police officer in Cambridge, Mass., in an incident rife with racial tension.

In a less publicized defense later that night at Union Pool in Brooklyn, the local art-rap group Das Racist offered a song to Mr. Gates, who famously testified on behalf of 2 Live Crew in a 1990 obscenity trial, locating that bawdy group’s performances in a long lineage of black oral traditions.

Mr. Gates, though, couldn’t have anticipated Das Racist, a pair of stoner jokesters: Himanshu Suri, whose parents emigrated from India, and Victor Vazquez, of Cuban and Italian heritage. But 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. Their act is 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?”

And this one, which Mr. Suri asked the tightly packed, largely white, artfully dressed and coifed crowd on Wednesday: “You guys like rap music at all?”

Both were fair questions. Das Racist formed at Wesleyan: if the Hoover administration promised a chicken in every pot, perhaps what the Obama era has to offer is a joke-rap ensemble at every liberal arts college. But 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.

See the full article here.

[Thanks to JohnWesley for the tip.]

* Seriously Wes, we’re curious. Tell us.

In an effort to clarify the sociopolitical context of Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, the Village Voice interviewed Hima and Kool A.D. in a feature this week, in which they expound on the origins of and reactions to Pizza Hut/Taco Bell, the prospect of being pigeonholed as fast-food rappers, the blipster phenomenon, and the value of street cred in the rap game.

Check out the Wallpaper remix of Pizza Hut Taco Bell, which might actually be one of the songs of the summer, go figure:

Mainstream success:

[via Buggin' Out]

Pitchfork: Track Reviews: Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell
Village Voice: A Chat with Das Racist
Perez Hilton: This Song is So Stoopid But We Kind of Love It