Last year Brooklyn-based rap duo Das Racist, aka Himanshu Kumar Suri and Victor Vazquez, achieved Internet memehood with their bizarre, hilarious, and strangely profound “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” which they released again this spring on the mix tape Shut Up, Dude. As goofy and stoned-sounding as that song is, though, they’re actually incredibly smart dudes, and they’ve showed it off (among other places) in an article for the Village Voice on the nature of Internet fame and in a widely read rebuttal of Sasha Frere-Jones’s notorious New Yorker essay on what he sees as the end of hip-hop as an engine of pop-music innovation.
Vazquez: This is my first time. We went straight to Wicker Park and we’ve been to Humboldt Park too. I like it a lot.
All: His mom’s house. Yeah.
Kondabolu: It was really cool. I’m really happy with it.
Kondabolu: Yeah, basically that. We played CMJ together.
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How do you feel about being tagged as a political rap group? It seems it’s either political rap or joke rap, and it’s hard for people to accept that it’s both.
Suri: We’ve been driving around in like a real green-energy type of car that runs only on 90s rap and, uh, realizing that, like, that fuel source is inexhaustible and beautiful.
