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The Eastern Echo Wednesday, June 25, 2025 | Print Archive
The Eastern Echo

Das Racist serious bong-water haziness

Despite all the ironic faux hip-hop ignorance and irreverence, at this point there should be no question as to whether or not Das Racist is serious.

With this latest effort, it focuses its lenses a bit, resulting in less “scatterbrained scattershot” and more to-the-point punctuality. Does this make its approach any less ridiculous?

On the contrary, this Brooklyn trio emerges on their first commercially released album as fully-formed mystics residing over all that is throw-away pop culture, ridiculous rap pandering and crass non-sequiturs (short answer: “no”).

The namedropping and self-references come at you rapid fire, so listen up newcomers. Potshots at social mores and ethnic stereotypes form the basis of its “serious” subject matter. Meanwhile, flirting with a scholarly ambivalence toward the merits of an afternoon spent taking bong shots and watching E! News would account for the gamut running nonsense.

Its beats are still boiling over with complexity, creating a imitation part Bollywood, part chip-tune, part club hopping and part P-funk all filtered through bong-water haziness.

The songs are infectiously melodic, even if they tiptoe cautiously around being outright listenable, i.e.
these are songs you have to learn to love.

“Michael Jackson” is almost disgusting in how fun and deft it is and “Happy Rappy” would have the potential to inspire grinding if it weren’t so damn weird, but with Das Racist, it’s really just par for the weed-covered course.

Despite all the effort Das Racist has put into fine tuning its craft, I can’t help but feel like its schtick worked better when it used throwaway jokes in throwaway songs that formed a sort of genius free-association rant.

I believe the main problem is that on “Relax,” the sum of its parts are greater than the whole, which is a complete reversal from what Das Racist’s previous mix tapes sought to be.

Also unlike its previous works, the sum of this album’s parts decided to merely burn incense rather than wrap me up in the group’s madness. When it strayed so far from what was so fun, I couldn’t help but inch my finger closer to the skip button on my iPod.

Final Grade: C-
Recommended Tracks: “Relax,” “Michael Jackson,” “Happy Rappy,” “Rainbow in the Dark.”