Das Racist - Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)
I feel about Das Racist kind of like I feel about Surfer Blood: I can’t tell if they’re good or if they just hit so many of my bred-in-the-bone reference points that I can’t help but like them. Am I being pandered to intentionally or just successfully? DR’s signal achievement, it seems to me as a person who doesn’t know much about these things, is artistically acknowledging a genre that fans and critics have implicitly recognized for some time now. You could call it Cartoon Network rap, I guess. It incorporates all or part of Kool Keith, De La Soul, Wu-Tang projects (especially Ghostface’s solo stuff), Madlib, the Clipse, backpacker rap in general, kinda Kanye, MF Doom, J Dilla, etc. etc. etc. You know what I’m talking about, even if I can’t name it. What makes these artists different from DR is that they didn’t really acknowledge their association with each other aside from collaborating on occasion. But the way people drop Biggie lyrics into songs—they weren’t doing that with each other, even though we see them as being their own little universe. Das Racist acknowledges these connections and creates their own universe of references. They are second-generation artists in this way, combining from within the history of their genre rather than representing their vision as self-contained. This marks a shift, it seems to me. You couldn’t just be smart: you had to be smart and hard, or smart and funny, or smart and crazy. DR are just smart. They’re funny, too, but what’s impressive about them is the breadth of their body of knowledge. That said body corresponds so closely with my own makes me wonder if this makes DR good or just appealing.
Ultimately, despite my suspicions, it’s hard not to conclude that they are, in fact, good. This track displays their smarts, skillfully playing their identities off carefully chosen cultural reference points, all while engaging in some great wordplay. But what makes it great is the way it circles back at the end to express a kind of moral judgment that immediately doubts itself, a great second-generation kind of statement about the way hybrid identities make such judgments unavoidably ambiguous. It uses rap’s language to talk about race and desire and culture in interesting ways, and I like that. Also, it’s hilarious. But you knew that already.
