DAS RACIST BROKE UP :(

Kool Ad on the left. Dap center. Heems on the right.

Fam i am so sad right now. I've been watching old interviews and just feeling like shit overall. They are were one of my favourite rap acts ever. From their on camera bro chemistry to their underrated rapping abilities, they were a joke rap (not joke rap) force to be reckoned with.

From what I have pieced together through their own reserved explanations online, the band broke up mainly because they had too many creative differences and they weren't having fun anymore...

I can't say I didn't see it coming. I kinda felt something was up when Heems and Kool AD were dropping solo tapes and there was no word on a follow up to Relax. Their stylistic differences became more apparent after these solo projects with Heems showing some clear improvements in the technical department and a strong desire for more mainstream appeal, while Kool AD went far far-left and didn't seem to give much of a fuck about rapping. Don't get me wrong. His music is still great and his rapping arguably better than Heems, but Victor has always been the weirder of the two. It just seems like his artistic vision or whatever was straying farther and farther from his Das Racist self.

These two are still gonna be making music in various capacities so I'm not too sad but dam...Das Racist meant a lot to me. Race played a huge role, with them being the most visible brown-skinned rappers since Jay-Z did that one song with Punjabi MC. But aside from them being visually identifiable to me, their music was also concerned with race issues in America. Usually the experience of being brown in a black industry living in a white man's world, but they touched on a lot of things.

Their brand of rapid-fire hyper-referential rap has led me to some of my favourite authors and thinkers and musicians. Each song was a hip hop history lesson as you listened and picked out lyrics refurbished from 80s and 90s rappers. The beats and hooks were infinitely catchy. You could tell they were direct descendants of M.I.A's social commentary over dancey beats. And they were hilarious. A lot of brainpower was spent trying to figure out whether they were serious or joking in their raps, but Das Racist has always been about smashing that binary. Who says you can't say something serious while being funny? Their humour extended into their videos and their interviews (this is probably up there on the list of greatest typed out interviews of all time) and it hurts to think I'll never get to read stuff like that again. I never got to see them live either..

I'll always have their music doe. I'll get back to my essays now. I just had to express my love for DR properly. I'll miss them.



P.S. This does open the door for new brown rappers to enter the stage (Tamillionaire bout to jump on that). I'm excited to see the influence they'll have on future generations of rappers.

P.P.S. I hope Dap still drops his mixtape..