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Player’s
Anthem
Heems has an unconventional
background for a rapper (he
used to work on Wall Street).
What makes Eat Pray Thug
compelling are its lyrics –
intelligent, emotional, evocative
Photo: GETTY IMAGES
Himanshu Suri
aka Heems
is a New
York-based
rapper. His
debut album,
Eat Pray Thug
(recorded in
Bandra) is
introspective
and
compelling
WOLF OF WALL STREET
H
IMANSHU SURI is a name that should roll quite
easily off Indian tongues but if Himanshu Suri
is the name of a New York-based rapper, it could
be a good idea to have a stage name that is more
rap friendly. So Suri, once part of the erstwhile hip-hop
group, Das Racist, raps under the name Heems. Das Racist
was a short-lived group and has to its credit a discography
of three releases: two freely downloadable mixtapes (Shut
Up, Dude and Sit Down, Man) and a studio album (Relax).
Humour was a big part of Das Racist, which was essentially
a duo plus a backup singer, and, especially after one of their
infectious early compositions, Combination Pizza Hut and
Taco Bell, went viral, they began getting labelled as a joke
rap band. After Das Racist disbanded, Heems, whose talents
by all accounts are multi-faceted (besides rap he’s into art,
activism and has his own recording label), launched his
solo career and recently released his debut album, Eat Pray
Thug, which was, by the way, recorded in India – in Mumbai’s Bandra, to be precise.
Eat Pray Thug is no jokey album. It’s serious. It’s political and introspective. Issues of identity (Suri’s a second
generation Indian American) appear in many of the songs,
particularly on a few that describe the experience of being
Sanjoy Narayan
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Photo: GETTY IMAGES
young and of Indian origin in New York City in the days
and months after 9/11. Suri was in school when that attack
happened and its aftermath affected him profoundly and
the one track that stands out is Flag Shopping. It’s about
how Indians and South Asians were targeted after the World Trade Center attacks
and how they tried to demonstrate their
oneness with the USA: We’re going flag
shopping for American flags/They’re star-
SUMMER OF '69
In 1969, a
band originally
called Chicago
Transit Authority
released their
self-titled debut
album. It is a
rock epic
ing at our turbans/ They’re calling them rags/ They’re calling them towels/ They’re calling them diapers/ They’re more
like crowns/ Let’s strike them like vipers... Politics recurs in
some of Heems’s other tracks as well – in the one titled Patriot Act; and in the cleverly titled AlQ8a.
But Eat Pray Thug also has its lighter moments. Pop
Song (Games), is a fun, danceable tune; Home and Damn,
Girl are about relationships; and Sometimes, the album
opener, is almost schizophrenic. Like all good rap albums,
what makes Eat Pray Thug a compelling listen are its lyrics
– intelligent, emotional and evocative. Heems has a background that is unconventional for a rapper: he attended
New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School and Wesleyan University and then worked on Wall Street before becoming a rap artist.
I’d heard both the Das Racist mix-tapes and their only
album, Relax, which, besides a dose of Punjabi in the form
of a bhangra-pop song, featured the rock band Yeasayers’
brilliant multi-instrumentalist Anand Wilder, and hip-hop
artists, El-P and Danny Brown. But Heems’s Eat Pray Thug
is different from those Das Racist releases. There’s the seriousness, of course, but there’s also the unmistakably deep
politics that tinges much of his work. This is a rapper that
deserves to be watched.
DOWN MEMORY LANE: In 1969, when The Beatles were
releasing Yellow Submarine and Abbey Road, a band originally called Chicago Transit Authority released their selftitled debut album. It was a double album by a new band
– not a format that a rock band normally chooses to debut
with, but they did. Chicago Transit Authority had
to change its name to just Chicago shortly after
that – when the real Chicago Transit Authority,
the city’s mass transit operator, threatened to sue.
But not before the debut album racked up sales of
over a million. That double album, which I consider a rock epic, is an early example of experimental rock; of a jazz-influenced big band playing
tracks that stretched to seven, eight and even 14
minutes.
In an era when rock bands usually had four or
five members, Chicago had seven, including, besides the very talented Terry Kath on guitars, Peter Cetera
on bass and vocals and Robert Lamm on piano, a trumpeter
and a trombonist. It was, as a band member once put it, a
rock band “with horns”. Chicago’s music lost a bit of its
edge in its later years (the band, incidentally, is still in existence) but in their heady early years, their music created
a huge impression on their peers, including the legendary
Jimi Hendrix who is believed to have once said that Terry
Kath (who died of a self-inflicted gunshot) was a better guitarist than himself. To check that out, give Chicago Transit
Authority a listen.
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To give feedback, stream or download the music
mentioned in this column, go to blogs.hindustantimes.
com/download-central. Write to Sanjoy at sanjoy.
[email protected] . Follow @
SanjoyNarayan on Twitter
MARCH 29, 2015
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