Das Racist, Weed, and Artistic Hang-ups

The fall of 2011 may have been the worst, most soul-crushing time of my life (at least so far, things could always get worse!) That summer I had graduated from high school and, unfortunately, discovered weed. By the time September hit I was starting my first term of real-deal college and struggling with the weight of what that meant. Most of my friends had moved away and I was going to a massive school where I knew no one and everyone was older than me. I was in a new situation, scared, and alone, so I clung onto the things that I knew would comfort me. At the time, that meant weed. I ran in the worst direction possible.

Weed made me feel perfect. It was almost literally heaven on earth. It is terrifying knowing it takes so little to make me so happy, but it also meant my ideal night involved a vape, podcasts, and copious amounts of junk food. I was drawn towards it because it felt like the only way to adjust. I could tell college represented a major shift in my life, and I could also tell I was not ready for it. I just wanted to keep playing video games and fucking around with my friends from high school, but that was now impossible. So instead I smoked and played video games by myself. Great.

I tried pairing pot with everything I could think of, and (aside from social interaction) it made everything better. Listening to music on weed? The most heavenly sound I’d ever heard. Listening to a podcast on weed? I had a hard time trying to breathe between all the laughter. A single Jones Soda was world-shatteringly delicious. In a way it was beautiful. It made the things I already liked even better. Something as insignificant as a 99 cent can of Arizona from the shithole 7-11 around the corner could be the highpoint of my night. It was beautiful and terrifying.

I recently read a quote from Anthony Bourdain that perfectly sums up what I’ve learned from this time: “There’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, and smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons, and old movies. I could easily do that. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid and outwit that guy.” I don’t want to fall into that. I don’t want to go down that well. I won’t.

I still learned something from this period. I learned about myself, I learned how not to handle pressure, and (more importantly) I discovered some great art during this time. I discovered the comedy podcast Uhh Yeah Dude, the crushing heaviness of stoner rock (a bit on-the-nose), and the hip-hop group Das Racist.

Aside from Eminem (every white kid’s favorite rapper), Das Racist was the first hip-hop group I genuinely enjoyed. They were the first artist within this genre that I discovered on my own. It’s selfish, but sometimes there’s a gross satisfaction with being the first person in your group of friends to discover something. For me, that was DR.

Das Racist are a now-defunct comedic hip-hop trio based out of Brooklyn, New York comprised of rappers Himanshu Kumar Suri (Heems), and Victor Vazquez  (Kool A.D.), as well as hype man Ashok Kondabolu (Dapwell). Many people were first exposed to the group in 2008 through their fluke viral hit “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” While literal essays have been written dissecting the song’s lyrics and meaning, it’s likely that if you listen to this track on your own you’ll get something out of it on at least one level.

As a group, they’ve often sat in a weird position, half of the people that heard “Pizza Hut” assumed they were some one-off youtube comedy group. The actual hip-hop community still seems divided between one camp who initially dismissed them as joke rap and a second that stuck around saw something deeper. The group’s hip-hop identity crisis is perfectly encapsulated in (what I consider) their definitive song “hahaha jk?”

When I was first turned onto the group they only had two mixtapes out: Shut up, DudeandSit Down, Man. Because my only other deep exposure to hip-hop at the time was Eminem, something about Das Racist opened a door in my mind. I didn’t know that hip-hop could be this funny or this tapped into pop culture. The trio’s incessant references to junk food, internet in-jokes, and 80’s icons was an intoxicating mix. To witness all of the things that these guys were pulling from and then piecing it together for myself was a fucking trip. And even if I didn’t get every reference the group was dropping, their delivery was so silky smooth that I didn’t even mind.

The reason I started this off by talking about weed is because, yes, I used it to escape, but it has also forever tainted the way I perceive most of the music I was listening to at this time. Maybe this filter was more from the overall darkness and feeling of treading water, but the weed certainly didn’t help. Sometimes an album, video game, podcast, or movie, can become so entangled in a feeling that it becomes impossible to separate. I guess it’s kind of like nostalgia, only it’s not necessarily a positive feeling. In this case, the fall of 2011 was an absolutely terrible time in my life. I ran to weed and used it to accentuate my already isolationist and habitual tendencies. I’d listen to the same songs, podcasts, and albums while smoking. As much as I love it, it’s hard for me to listen to Uhh Yeah Dude just because the host’s voices bring this feeling back so strongly. What once was an incredible escape has now become tainted with darkness and listlessness (which is exactly the opposite of what a comedy podcast should evoke).

Nearly everything I was consuming at this time has been filtered through this lense, it’s all associated with this weird, dark, directionless sinking feeling… All of it except Das Racist. Somehow they are the one that gets a pass, and I don’t know why. I listened to “Amazing” nearly every day. The released their debut studio album that same fall. You’d think they would be just as tied to this negative emotion as the rest of what I was consuming at the time, but somehow they came out unscathed.

I think it’s just a testament to how fucking good they are. Das Racist is somehow able to levitate above my own mental connections, above this weird filter, and above my own negative nostalgia. That’s impressive. I have absolutely no idea how to end this other than saying Das Racist aren’t the typical rap group. There’s a stretch of songs on their second mixtape that exemplifies everything the group does well: Rapping 2 U,  Rooftop, and Return to Innocence. DR were able to make something wholly unique within the hip-hop genre (a scene that I was decidedly not a part of and wanted nothing to do with). They created something that left a major impression on me and is one of the few things from that time in my life that I can still listen to fresh and without any negative associations.

Weed fucking sucks. I obviously “get” weed, but after enough bad trips, stupid decisions, and perspective, I’ve come to realize that it’s not for me. I don’t look down on people that smoke, and after all, it genuinely helps some people… but I just think that in my case it did more harm than good. I’m glad that I experienced it, and it absolutely opened my mind up in different directions, but it’s not something I’d ever want to “return to.” Das Racist is my one solid tie still remaining from that point in my life, and the fact that their music was able to come out the other side of that experience unaffected is fucking commendable. It’s rap no one else does, and that no one else can do. It was cultural, self-aware, tapped-in hip-hop that is not only unaffected by my own stupid brain, but a genuine joy to listen to. It showed me what hip-hop was possible of achieving, and the fact that it’s just as comedic as it is genuine is an incredibly rare feat. Thank god for this group of three racially-ambiguous men.

Combating Fall

The thing that I love most about Oregon (aside from our craft beers, eccentric facial hair, and borderline-oppressive foliage) is that we get to experience all four seasons. The ability to witness the shift of each season is a beautiful thing, but fall always seems to be a time of the year that’s laced with bittersweet melancholy.

Aside from the turning of the leaves, the vanishing sun, and the unrelenting torrent of rain, fall has always been a season of loss. It’s synonymous with the beginning of a new school year, and that’s a feeling that I’ve always dreaded. It’s not that I disliked school, but I’ve come to realize that the first week of classes represents something more than just “the start of a new school year,” it’s realizing how little you did with your summer, and how much you still wanted to do. It’s a sea change that is so closely tied to the season that I can’t help but feel a lingering sense of sadness through the month.

I’ve realized that my nostalgic tendencies are (in many cases) simply coping mechanisms to combat the inherent feelings of sadness that some seasons bring. I’ve also realized that for about a decade every fall has represented “the last year” of something in my mind. In middle school it was ‘holy shit, high school. This is the loss of all childhood innocence.’ Halfway through high school it was ‘holy shit, I’m taking classes and I need to get a job?’ Throughout college it was a constant stream of ‘holy shit, this term is gonna be even harder than the last?’ Last fall it was ‘holy shit, I need to finish school, work my job, and work an internship?’

I now realize that each fall before this I was concerned solely (and selfishly) with a loss of free time. Summer is nothing but free time, it’s the ultimate fuck-around season. Fall is the antithesis of summer, it’s a complete sea change in everything from the weather to my daily routine. Nostalgia is just finding things about the season you like and holding onto them for dear life. There’s something comforting about breaking out your jeans from last year, or listening to an album that you only listen to during this time of the year.

But up until very recently, my free time was what I valued above nearly everything else. Fall takes all that away because what used to be endless hours of summer fuck-around time is now dedicated to school. This past year I wrapped up my final term of college and an advertising internship, and all of my greatest fears were realized. The past 8 months I’ve had the least free time that I’ve ever had in my life, but something unexpected happened: I didn’t mind. I absolutely loved that internship and rarely ever longed to go back to the carefree “fuck around” summers of past. I was willingly trading in my free time for work because I finally found something that I loved doing.

Now I sit here as I’ve finished my final year of college and that internship feeling the same creeping dread as previous years, but for an entirely different reason. Now I just hope I find a job that I enjoy as much as that internship. I want to find something that I enjoy that much and would unwaveringly trade in my free time for.  

I recognize I’ve experienced this insane level of restlessness and uncertainty before and it’s turned out okay every other time. In fact, I’ve come out of each one of those experiences a better person… but this one feels different. This one feels final.   

I think what it comes down to is that if I enjoy what I’m doing, then that panic dissipates almost immediately. I just don’t know if I’ll enjoy it until I experience it, and up until that point, it’s just an unknown that my paranoid mind fills with only the worst possible outcome. I’m afraid of the unknown. I’m terrified of change, and fall is a season that always brings change. I just don’t know if it’s for better or worse until it actually happens.

At the time of writing, I’m terrified that I won’t find a job, or that my job will feel like work. And don’t get me wrong, I love work, and I’ll willingly ring myself dry if it’s going towards something that I find satisfying. But I’ve also experienced jobs that are immensely unsatisfying. I just want to write. If I can write I’ll be happy. And if you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life (just look at pornstars, they never have any lasting psychological issues). I don’t know. I’m on the edge of an abyss and I’m about to be in control for the first time in my life. I’m just as scared as I am excited. I don’t want to make the wrong first move. I don’t want to fuck it up right out of the gates.

Every other change has been for the best, so I can only hope that this one will be too. I can feel the existential dread creeping in, but I’m too far along to turn back now. The biggest difference is, this time, I need to seek it out. This isn’t an impending school year that I’ll have to participate in regardless of whether I’m ready or not, this is something I need to undertake on my own. Change won’t come to me. A job won’t fall in my lap. This is one change that I need to charge into headfirst. I can’t wait for life.

VH1 and Sponginess

For all my talk about metal, hip-hop, and my punk counterculture mentality (make no mistake, I am a hipster shithead at heart) I also have an affection for a very specific era of pop music. At the risk of talking about the same year again, 2006 was an important period because I had nothing better to do than absorb everything around me. I was culturally-conscious for the first time in my life, and as a result, much of what I care about stems from this time.

Specifically, in 2006 I had nothing better to do than watch VH1 every morning. It’s a weird go-to thing for a thirteen year old to watch on a saturday morning, but I guess at the time it was an intoxicating mixture of titillation and maudlin pop tunes. As seems to be a recurring theme during this time period, I just didn’t know any better. I was a sponge, happy to absorb whatever random droplets of media rolled my way. 2006 was also early enough that I couldn’t really seek out anything on the internet, and I was far too young (and lazy) to actually go and discover things in a record store. As a result, I defaulted to watching VH1 for one to two hours every morning. Nothing weird about that. Just a 13 year old boy watching the top 20 adult contemporary music videos. Over and over and over again.

While I think it’s a hilarious image in retrospect, I actually have a profound appreciation for what is ultimately just another year of generic pop songs. There’s probably someone a year older than me who feels the same way about 2005, and there’s probably someone a year younger than me who feels the same way about 2007. But for me, I have a soft spot in my heart for The All-American Rejects, The Fray, KT Tunstall, and Shakira. Her hips didn’t lie to me.

This Spotify playlist is relatively comprehensive and reflective of the hits that year. Now let me stop you before you say anything else. There’s a lot of corny shit in there. A lot. I recognize that. “Bad Day” by Daniel Powter? Yeah you’re the reason I’m having a bad day, Daniel. “For You I Will” by Teddy Geiger? How bout you don’t, Teddy boy. “Waiting on the World To Change” by John Mayer? How ‘bout you make the first move, Mayer. Yeah this is basically sitting in a dentist’s office waiting to get your teeth drilled music. This is some cornball shit, and I fully admit that. Sometimes dragging your shame songs out into the light is healthy.

VH1 wasn’t all bad at this time, there was also some genuinely good stuff from this era that I’ll still listen to occasionally: “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, “Dani California” by the Chilli Peppers, and “Idlewild Blue” by OutKast are all songs I unabashedly and unironically love. I just find it weird that all these genuinely (and objectively) great songs occupy the same space in my mind as stuff like “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield.

God knows I’ll never put down an individual’s taste, but there’s no reason I can’t put down my own. I’m grateful that I moved out of this phase within a year and stopped relying on “the charts” for new music by the end of the year. I’m sad that this is the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a member of the MTV generation. They got Nirvana, and I got Blue October. They got The Breeders, and I got P!nk. They got 90’s Madonna, and I got 2006 Madonna. It’s not all bad music, I’m just sad that these are the songs that I associate with my early teenage years. It could have been so much better. I could have been so much cooler. But hey, sometimes ya just gotta roll with the punches. Sometimes you can’t keep a 13 year old from obsessively watching Nelly Furtado. And now, for better or worse, 2006 pop is one of foundations of my musical pyramid. Such is life. Sometimes you can’t hide your inner teenager.

iPods, Iron Men, and Matchboxes

My first iPod was terrible. And I don’t mean the device itself, my little light blue iPod Mini was one of the greatest things I’d ever owned and one of my prized possessions throughout middle school. No, I mean the contents of my first iPod were absolutely, undeniably, testical-shatteringly horrible. The first CD that I ever burned to iTunes was Matchbox 20’s debut album Yourself or Someone Like You. Ugh. The second thing that I put onto my iPod was a burned CD of random Weird Al tracks given to me by a friend. Slightly less judgmental ugh. Now I don’t mean to shit on either of these two artists, they’re technically fine in the grand scheme of things, but these two were literally it. 40-some tracks consisting solely of Matchbox 20 and Weird Al. I cannot think of a more hellish combination. I’ve read about musical torture in which someone is forced to listen to the same songs at a deafening level for days on end… but my iPod in 2005 would have given those playlists a run for their money. My iTunes library would have been enough to make even the most steadfast soldier spill their guts. But I was happy. Mainly because I didn’t know better, but also because I was amazed I could listen to more than one CD at a time.

In 2005, the same friend who cursed me with the Matchbox 20 CD and the Weird Al mix gave me a new burned disc simply titled “Matt’s Mix.” I had to rely on him as my sole source of new music because he unabashedly used Limewire, and I was too scared of getting a virus or being arrested to use it myself. “This is pretty cool” he told me ahead of time “you’re gonna love it.” Because he hadn’t steered me wrong yet, I tossed the disc in my computer excited to see what it contained. This was a time before anyone knew (or had the ability) to label tracks on burned CDs, so within iTunes everything came up as “Track 01”, “Track 02”, “Track 03”, etc. Intrigued by the mystery (as well as Matt’s ringing endorsement of its contents, I loaded the unknown files into my iPod and hit play.

What I heard was the first destructive, resonant chord of AC/DC’s “TNT”. I didn’t know what to make of it. This didn’t sound like Rob Thomas at all. And the lyrics didn’t discuss Yoda, food, or the lifestyle of the Amish. It was like hearing music for the first time.

The tracks that followed were essentially a greatest hits of the Australian band’s first nine albums. From High Voltage to For Those About to Rock I had been turned onto something that I genuinely connected with. Because I was at the musical whim of my friend, I ended up listening to these tracks dozens of times, replaying them until I knew every word and every beat. Later that same year I realized that my Dad had thousands of CDs just sitting on a bookshelf in his office, and as it turns out, most of them were classic rock. Maybe he wasn’t as lame as I thought. Within the thousands of albums my dad owned were the first eight AC/DC albums, all of which I promptly ripped to my iPod and enjoyed endlessly.

When my dad noticed that I was listening to his music he asked me if I’d ever heard of Black Sabbath before and recommended that I listen to his copy of Paranoid. If I can point to a single moment that led me to love heavy metal it was that album.

Back in 2005 there was one moment late in a cold fall school night. My family had just finished eating dinner, my two brothers had retreated upstairs to their rooms and my parents were out on their nightly walk. I stayed in the living room and snuck that copy of Paranoid into my family’s stereo. I skipped directly to track 4 “Iron Man” and cranked the stereo up almost as loud as it could go. I put my head between the speakers and pressed play.

The sound seemed to reverberate through my body. I could feel it in my core. The ominous drum beat gave me goosebumps. The powerful fuzzed-out chords made my brain contort. Ozzy’s first distorted cry “I AM IRON MAN” made my hair stand on end. It put me in a trance-like state and it was the first time I had ever heard something so heavy so loud. I saw it all when I closed my eyes, I felt it shake the structure around me. It was beautiful. It was metal.

Most importantly, Paranoid paved the way for heavier music that I’d go onto enjoy for the rest of my life. They opened the gates to metal, stoner rock, psychedelic music, and so much more. I can trace it all back to that one night that I spent shaking with joy that something like this existed. The journey that I went on to arrive at that point was definitely a weird one, the jump from Matchbox 20 to AC/DC to Sabbath isn’t a progression I think many other people have made. It’s a cliché, but sometimes the journey really is more important than the destination. In this case it’s a journey without a destination. Music and personal taste has no end point, I’m always discovering new music, and my life wouldn’t be the same without it. I appreciate “the journey” in retrospect, but more than anything, I’m glad it went somewhere quickly. If it wasn’t for that terrible first collection of music I’d have nowhere to go to. Nothing to run from, and no reason to look for anything better. The blandness of Matchbox 20 sent me on a musical journey that’s still ongoing to this day. Thank you Rob Thomas.

Traditions and Nostalgia

If nothing else, I’m a nostalgic person. I played through the entire Mass Effect series over the course of several whirlwind months a few years back, and one of the things that stuck with me the most, out of the hundreds of hours of gameplay, was a single conversation with one of the characters. The character, Thane, was a member of an alien race who had the ability to relive any moment of his life with perfect clarity. I remember watching this scene and genuinely thinking ‘that would be pretty cool’ until the character continued talking and convinced me otherwise. I find it worrying that “cool!” was my initial reaction to what is ultimately a curse.

I catch myself waxing poetic things that happened mere months ago. And it’s not a ‘aw, wasn’t that nice?’ kind of feeling, it’s more of a crippling ‘I WANT TO GO BACK’ kind of feeling. I’m 23, and I don’t feel like I should be that nostalgic over something that happened a couple months ago. To make things worse, this nostalgia compounds on itself and becomes more powerful as the events become further and further away. The plus side to this is that I am often the centerpiece of my own nostalgic tendencies. That sounds incredibly absorbed and self-centered, but it’s actually just a side-effect of how much I love to be alone.

Because the feeling can be so overpowering, I prefer to think of my nostalgia trips as self-imposed traditions. Whether you like it or not, everyone has tradition forced upon them. Every Christmas we collectively experience the same traditions as a society. The same music is being played in the stores, the same specials are being aired on TV, and even the fronts of buildings change to reflect the candy cane color scheme. Hell, we spend time, money, and natural resources wrapping our trees in little lights just because it’s a specific month. Christmas is the only time we collectively change our environment, and more importantly, these changes are all completely out of our control. It doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Wiccan, or a Scientologist, you’re gonna hear those tunes over the course of those two months whether you like it or not. And this isn’t some “war on Christmas” rant, the point is sometimes seasons carry traditions which overpower everything else around them.

Sometimes traditions don’t make sense, but we do them because they make us feel good. As Community pointed out in “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” Christmas isn’t about presents, or food, or even Jesus: Christmas is about family. Christmas is about literally and figuratively getting closer to your family and using them as support to get through the coldest, darkest, harshest time of the year. Christmas isn’t for Christians, Christmas is symbolic: it’s is about what your family does. Now, what your family does may entail presents, food, or Jesus, but in the end, it’s human connection that carries us through what would otherwise be the most unforgiving season of the year.

Because I spend so much time alone, music is often the key element to my own nostalgia. My iTunes contains a worrying number of playlists tied to specific years, seasons, and even days. As a 23-year-old I’m accustomed to viewing life in school-like quarters (I guess normal people call them seasons?), and the changing of the seasons always comes with a new rotation of music on my iPhone. I feel like that’s relatively normal, but the problem is that I often reinforce my own nostalgia by recreating the circumstances the following year.

I’ll waste dozens of hours listening to a specific podcast, revisiting a specific album, or even playing through an entire video game just because it brings back a fraction of what I had felt at a previous time. Why am I so obsessed with recreating the past? It’s not like I have any regrets. I’m not trying to make things better, or take back what I’ve done… It just feels good.

I don’t think nostalgia trips are necessarily a bad thing, but I worry that this zealot-like commitment to recreating the past may be holding me back from missing opportunities in the present. 2016 has been the best year of my life, and I owe that entirely to the new experiences I’ve had this year. The people I’ve meet, the things I’ve done, all the amazing things I never thought I’d be a part of… See? I’m already getting nostalgic about a year that’s not even over yet. The point is I’ve had a great year, and I owe it all to trying something new. There’s something to be said from learning from the past, and I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with revisiting your personal history, but I suppose it’s all a matter of not falling into it completely.

Over the next several months I’m sure I’ll make specific posts dedicated to individual pieces of my nostalgia, and I’m starting to realize that’s the point of this blog. I think if I can document this all somewhere I’ll be able to get these nostalgic demons off my chest and move on to bigger, better, and newer things. There’s so much beauty in the world, and I just want to share some of what I’ve found. Sometimes it’s as simple as a week over winter break that I spent shut in with a video game. Sometimes it’s an album whose opening chords are so powerful that I can’t help but be transported back to a specific time and place. Even if no one is reading this, I think it will be a great exercise to document my personal traditions and show how these things far in the past still impact me to this very day.

I feel like these personal traditions, the things you do by yourself, aren’t something people talk about openly a lot. But they’re important. I believe personal traditions are some of the most unadulterated experiences we have as humans, something that shows who we are and what we find important. We’re all a collection of favorite albums, this is just mine.