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 Mum-bai’s Bandra, to be precise.

Eat Pray Thug is no jokey album. It’s serious. It’s po-litical 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

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 tar-geted 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-

ing at our turbans/ They’re calling them rags/ They’re call-ing 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 Pa-triot 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 back-ground that is unconventional for a rapper: he attended New York’s prestigious Stuyvesant High School and Wes-leyan University and then worked on Wall Street before be-coming 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 seri-ousness, 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 origi-nally called Chicago Transit Authority released their self-titled 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 con-sider a rock epic, is an early example of experi-mental 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, be-

sides 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 ex-istence) 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 gui-tarist than himself. To check that out, give Chicago Transit Authority a listen.

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Himanshu Suri aka Heems is a New York-based rapper. His debut album, Eat Pray Thug (recorded in Bandra) is introspective and compelling

Sanjoy Narayan

download central

WOLF OF WALL STREETHeems 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

SUMMER OF '69In 1969, a band originally called Chicago Transit Authority released their self-titled debut album. It is a rock epic

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

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MARCH 29, 2015