Album Review: Himanshu Suri's "Nehru Jackets"

Himanshu Suri is not a role model. It’s a common trope for people of color: they’re taken as paragons for an entire race or culture and constantly questioned about the ‘right’ ways to treat or conceptualize ‘them’. You have only to trawl Heems's tumblr, Nehru Jackets, on the odd late night to see this scenario play out. The questions (and answers) range from asinine to heartfelt to condescending. Heems’s first solo mixtape shares both a name and a purpose with his tumblr, bringing together in-joke-y internet-era culture and extended treatments of South Asian racial experience.

Nehru Jackets gathers mostly new songs with a few odds and ends that Heems has released online. As mixtapes become more polished, the line separating them from proper albums has blurred. There’s no confusion here. Das Racist’s debut album, Relax, was a bright and brisk 50 minutes. Nehru Jackets offers a varied mix of song sketches, bangers, and the odd filler track that totals over twenty minutes longer than that. It has a disparate sound, like Das Racist’s first mixtape, Shut Up, Dude, which similarly collected songs recorded over the preceding year or so.

The previously released songs mark many of the mixtapes high points. “Womyn” is still an archly ironic love song to ladies who might deny love’s existence. “Swate” is a satisfying trunk rattler that finds Heems in his early-phase, highly humorous form. Given the MC’s verbal fulsomeness, even ostensibly low-key tracks have conversation-starting lines like, “If you wear a turban / You can’t be a cop / But you can shoot one”. There’s the expected wry amalgamation of rap themes and fast food, like “Got some cheese on that bitch / Coronaries clogged coz I / Got disease in that bitch”. And even superficially silly songs like “Jason Bourne” — which recapitulates the adventures of, well, Jason Bourne — read like slanted commentaries on American foreign policy when they share a side with a song titled “Juveniles Detained at Guantanamo Bay”.

Heems clearly puts a heavy emphasis on community-building in many ways. Like the RZA twenty years ago, Heems is building a small rap empire in New York City. He elicits strong performances from Lakutis, Despot, Big Baby Ghandi, all artists on his own Greedhead record label. There are also appearances by similar-minded blog A-listers Danny Brown, Mr. Muthafuckin Exquire, Action Bronson, and of course Victor Vasquez. Das Racist/Greedhead releases tend to use similar guest artists, evening out their inconsistency with an underlying artistic unity. And throughout the mixtape, there are little melodic and verbal callbacks to older songs that give the crew something like a mythology by simply hewing closely to catchy leitmotifs.

The most notable collaborators on the album are ones likely to be unknown outside their own zip codes. Pawan sings a hook, and Ravi EAH Singh and Lovedeep Singh both rap fluidly, in Punjabi. They became affiliated with Heems through Seva, a nonprofit organization based in Queens, NY with the goal of helping South Asian and West Indian residents. (Their most recent work focuses on redistricting Queens’s Richmond Hill to empower its immigrant residents.) Heems has recently joined the board of Seva, and he released Nehru Jackets on the organization’s website.

And now we’re back to the beginning: Himanshu Suri’s music is always going to be specifically about the South Asian experience in America without being merely about it. In one of the more lengthy and sincere posts on his blog, Heems says, “ITS FUN TO REMIND WHITE PEOPLE THAT THEY ARE WHITE BECAUSE THEY JUST THINK THEY ARE THEY”. A song like “NYC Cops” — one of the mixtape’s highlights — does just that. A lot was made of the Occupy movement’s interactions with police — whether through mass arrests or abuse of non-lethal weapons like pepper spray. “NYC Cops”, ostensibly a cover of The Strokes’s song, calmly condenses about twenty instances of the police murdering various people of color with gross impunity and little justice. It’s four minutes of unceasing invective against the institutional racism that runs rampant over millions of the city’s residents. And it’s a virtually unheard counterpoint to the city’s Occupy movement, where white people have the privilege of choosing to get arrested so they can write about it in the New Yorker. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Heems used to work on Wall Street, and now he’s writing polemics against the city’s police force.

It is a particularly odd state of affairs that Heems and company are often cited for making ‘hipster rap’, which seems to be code for ‘white rap’. They go out of their way to bluntly deflate and demythologize the structures of power and oppression in America. It’s a commendation of their humor that they're not dismissed as mere identity politics culture warriors. “Womyn 2”, a remix of an older Heems song, makes a good contrast. Childish Gambino, the rap persona of Donald Glover, is given ample room to sound off about ‘womyn’, but he doesn’t come close to the droll ease of the original. He uses the opportunity to (further) fetishize Filipino women, brag about his cunnilingus skill, and complain about not “sounding black”. In contrast, there’s “Desi Shoegaze Taiko”, a song that sounds like it came fresh out of GarageBand. Heems breaks down his short biography and friendship with the mixtape’s sole producer, Mike Finito. The song transports the listener to the Queens of Heems’ childhood, from high school to 9/11, the immigrant experience, and Heem’s own second-generation small business start-up. The song’s also a bit of an antacid to “NYC Cops”‘s biliousness. Even though things are bad, they’re not that bad as long as you’ve got your friends and community.

Nehru Jackets is of a place. It’s about New York, but not the kind available on Sex and the City or Bored to Death. Heems’s said, the album “sounds like the neighborhoods in Queens we grew up around. It is somewhat abrasive.” It sounds it. Finito’s production is lo-fi and scuzzy. Even though tracks alternate between raucous and blissed out, all of the music has a thick layer of outer-borough scuzz atop it all. But atop that sonic layer, there’s a sense of unity and belonging for the diverse artist involved: young kids from Queens, globetrotting blog rappers, and MCs about to blow up all belong on Nehru Jackets. Any and all listeners who are at all cognizant they even could be excluded from something will feel as if they belong in this music.

January 26, 2011