A couple months back I was asked to write an editorial about the killing of Trayvon Martin. I declined because I was in the middle of touring and felt I couldn’t put enough time into saying something interesting or relevant to add to the discussion that hadn’t already been said several times in…
386 - 
This is a french fotonovela with Das Racist realized in Paris in December 2010. It tells the story of three girls who couldn’t go to Das Racist’s show but happened to met the band in a grocery store.
Thursday, January 19
I woke up the morning of January 17, 2012, and met with the Greedhead (our label) intern and began packing shirts, CDs, and vinyl to bring on tour with us. The touring party arrived one after another, consisting of Aleksey Weintraub (rapper Lakutis) and bandmates Himanshu and Victor. We flew JFK to LAX. I spent that flight worried that I’d broken a fisheye lens I’d packed in a bag I was kicking around the security line. It was not broken. We then flew a 13-hour flight from LAX to Auckland International Airport. The last three hours of the flight, I watched the film Puss in Boots on mute. I like watching movies on mute during flights so I can read at the same time. I mostly like to pretend it makes me more sensitive to nonverbal communication between human beings. I hope this is true.
Dosa Hunt Trailer - A short film presented by Amrit Singh and Greedhead - Coming Spring 2012
Nehru Jackets Review by Anthony Fantano
The tug of war over redrawing electoral districts in Queens has forged an unlikely friendship between a community organizer and a globe-trotting rapper.
Prominent Queens-bred rapper Himanshu Suri is adding his voice to the contentious redistricting debate, joining the board of directors of SEVA, a Richmond Hill-based immigrant rights group.
“This is ground zero for gerrymandering in New York City,” said Suri, 26, who
will perform at a SEVA event Monday to coincide with the release of his solo album “Nehru Jackets.”
CHITTU CHATTU is a conversational podcast hosted by renowned journalist and critic Julianne Escobedo Shepherd, and infamous idea man Ashok “Dapwell” Kondabolu. Episode 1 features web sensation Lil Internet (@lilinternet), whose capacity for dazzling Twitter is topped only by his skills in front of the camera. As the immensely pleasurable host of Karmaloop TV, he brings endless nuggets of delight to all of his subjects, from pro skater Terry Kennedy to Dapwell’s own incredibly difficult and reticent group Das Racist (which is how we met him). On the internet, Lil Internet is in a class unto himself; in 2011 alone he perfected the art of transcendant all-caps typing and invented a fake musical genre, #seapunk, which has now apparently turned into a real genre. We discuss all those things and more, including Project Pat, eating dogs, and Y2K, on the debut episode of CHITTU CHATTU.
A lot’s happened since the last time self-titled spent an afternoon with Das Racist, exploring the Queens neighborhood where MC Heems and hypeman Dapwell grew up. For one thing, the Brooklyn trio—rounded out by Kool A.D., possibly the only rapper we’ve ever seen rocking a pair of Zubaz pants—finally released its first proper album, Relax, a record that rightfully earned the group a Spin cover and the tagline “hip-hop’s smartest smartasses.” Relax has also kept Das Racist on the road for the past few months.
So rather than grill them about their role in underground rap or what it was like working with members of Vampire Weekend, Yeasayer and El-P, we asked the group about 25 of 2011’s most talked-about tracks…
In our series Food Pics of the Well Known, we reveal the secret eating and drinking lives of some of our favorite notable people by peeking inside their smartphone snapshot libraries.
Dap would be the gentleman in the middle.
Photograph by Ryan Muir
Ashok Kondabolu—better known as Dap from NYC rap trio Das Racist—is in a van an hour outside Houston and all he can think about is Dimassi’s all-you-can-eat Mediterranean Buffet, which his traveling crew will be hitting later in the evening. “I’ve been dreaming about cabbage and fattoush all day,” says the fast-talking “mostly vegetarian” DJ and hype man.
Kondabolu is no stranger to ethnic eating. He, along with group member Himanshu Suri (a.k.a. Heems), grew up in Queens eating mostly Punjabi and South Indian food prepared by their families. A high school discovery of fast food inspired the band’s breakout song, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” which plays as a gonzo homage to Pepsi Co. cross-pollination. A song off the band’s recent album Relax builds on the food theme with lines about White Castle hamburgers and Roquefort.
We asked the recent Spin cover boy to document some of his food highlights from the road, including fan-gifted cupcakes and mashed potatoes and the “world’s greatest coconut cream pie.” —Matt Rodbard
Cupcakes
“We had tweeted something earlier that day about having cupcakes brought to us at a show in Atlanta, which was more likely an insinuation that we were looking for, um, something else. But a fan showed up with two dozen fancy cupcakes from a local bakery. They were really good. But, after you eat two dozen over a couple days, you get really sick of them.”
Does anyone have any volumizing product?” asks Himanshu Suri, a.k.a Heems (center), returning from a quick glance in his bedroom mirror and stepping out into the living room of the messy ground-floor apartment he rents in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. So I Married an Axe Murderer is playing on a flat screen. Clouds of smoke waft through the room. After running a dollop of mousse through his hair, the 25-year-old rapper decides on a gray snapback and lights a joint, offering it to his Das Racist bandmates Victor Vazquez (left) and Ashok Kondabolu.
Last month, Das Racist released their debut album, Relax, the official follow-up to their 2010 mixtapes Shut Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man. “Calling it an album and not a mixtape and then selling it for money will probably make people think of it as something more ‘real,’” says Vazquez. “But it’s not all that different from the music we’ve made previously.” That music, which includes the 2008 viral hit “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” and more recent singles like “hahahaha jk?” are part of Das Racist’s catalog of seemingly puerile pothead raps, which, when actually given a serious listen, tell stories from the perspective of disaffected American minorities. (Suri and Kondabolu, who went to high school together, are both of Indian descent and were born in Queens; Vazquez, a San Francisco native, is of Afro-Cuban and Italian heritage.)
Source: Spin Magazine, November 2011
