- Kyle Johnson/Wikimedia Commons
- Das Racist
The only people who were probably more worked up about Jay-Z’s “Open Letter” than racist Fox Nation diehards are Jay-Z dorks like me, who always get excited when Jay gets pissed off and decides to recapture a little of the genius bad attitude he had around the turn of the millennium, when he was beefing simultaneously with every other rapper in the world except for Memphis Bleek. So hearing him so elegantly diss conservative America got me to put Blueprint on my phone, which, as I tend to forget sometimes, contains “Girls, Girls, Girls,” which remains one of the dumbest and most racist songs to ever make the pop charts. I can still vividly remember the first time I heard the line about the “Indian squaw” he meets and asks “what tribe she with, red dot or feather” and thinking to myself that there is no way he had actually said what I thought I’d heard.
So of course that line popped into my head when I first heard about an unreleased track by the recently disbanded Das Racist (a rap group that’s two-thirds South Asian), produced by A Tribe Called Red (a Canadian First Nations electronic group that combines club music with traditional powwow music), called “Indians From All Directions.” In typical Das Racist style, the song’s concept is a cheap punch line that at second glance is much deeper than it seems, with the humor coming at the expense of anyone who’s ever made a “red dot or feather” joke. And it just knocks.
Hit the jump to give it a spin. It feels good to laugh at racism for a minute after a week where the media have been completely saturated in the stuff.