Das Racist + Holy Ghost! + Reporter + Rude Dudes – Branx (Portland, OR; Apr. 13, 2011)

Rude Dudes were more like singular rude dude (Portland’s DJ Rad!) hidden behind a black castle of speakers and music equipment. No one in the audience knew who was performing unless they dared approach the right side of the stage in order to see a man in a ball-cap and headphones playing mad scientist behind a Macbook. The 21+ corral was packed and doused in red light while the all-ages area was wide open as a carpool lane in L.A. A small group of excitable kids danced their way to the stage, which eventually started a snowball effect, and soon the floor was blanketed with feet. The beeps and thumps of Rude Dude’s hip-hop/techno/R&B remixes droned on while a real-life rude dude screamed angrily at the stage: “Play some real MUSIC! Enough of this shit! Come on!” A few people shot evil looks in his direction, but I secretly endorsed the man’s sentiment, though my method of dissent gravitated toward quiet tolerance in the name of civility. To each their own form of futile problem solving methods.

Reporter broke the tension and weaved their first melodic utterances into Rude Dude’s last. The transition was sweet. But the sweetness was soon overcome by hypnosis. By that I mean, pure sensory domination via lasers, fog, whomp-whomp-whomp’s at regular intervals, and the silhouette of a tiny Asian dancer floating her tiny saccharine voice into a microphone. It was as if they had extracted the essence of all our techno fantasies and drank them like evil masterminds before the show. My former assessment of them still stands: If I flee the earth on a spaceship journey, I’d like to have Reporter as a soundtrack. Bear in mind that real-life-rude-dude was still shouting pearls of rudeness between each song. So the combined effect was jarring, like sailing on an ocean tide at sunset, and between the sound of the waves crashing, seagulls call a reassuring, “You SUCK!” and “Booooo!”, intermittently pulling you back to shore. Insert your own analogy.

Most importantly, Holy Ghost! had nice haircuts. They looked like nice boys. And their music was nice, like a brand new wool pea coat – fashionable and timeless, but on those first days when it’s free of loose threads and cat fur. They plowed through the tracks on their new self-titled album, sprayed (polished and calculated, of course) analog-synth disco all over the room, ended with a ten-second energetic finale, and promptly fled the scene.  If you’re hip to said scene, Holy Ghost! will undoubtedly remind you of Chromeo and Phoenix. And before we go pointing fingers at who’s copying who, set your judgments aside, for they are all, like, totes BFFs. Having remixed tracks for both bands and played keys for LCD Soundsystem, Holy Ghost! are remarkably adept at creating infectious pop tunes. It was a treat to see them before they blow up.

The fourth band was called An Hour Long Intermission While We Wait for Das Racist to Show Up. They started out strong, or maybe the crowd was just still buzzing from the sugary Holy Ghost! set and high on anticipation for the headliners. Either way, the energy fizzled after a half hour. Food rations were depleting. The fries at the snack bar ran out only to be sorely substituted by school-lunch-sized bags of Fritos (Trademark). It was approaching 1am. The bathrooms were looming toward third-day Honey Bucket standards. People started losing their wits, talking about the weather and checking stock reports on their iPhones. Do we make a dash to the frites cart? But we’ll miss the show! Things were looking grim.

But just before two young mothers nearly pulverized each other over the last bag of Peanut M&Ms (Trademark) for their starving children, a thunderous roar erupted from the crowd, stopping the seething patrons dead in their tracks. Das Racist had arrived.

Das Racist are art-school comedians who use hip-hop to subvert stereotypes, to provoke thought about questionable institutions like combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell restaurants (Trademark), and to remind us that waving our hands back and forth to Naughty By Nature’s “Hip-Hop Hooray” is frowned upon. Between songs, they don’t deliver one liners; they erupt in chatter like kindergartners who have been asked what they think of Pikachu. And just like kids, they want to show you everything that they’ve been up to lately. For Das Racist, it’s making funny faces, pushing the eagle, panther, and cougar sound effect buttons a lot, wearing ten hats at once, and making raps.

“So is Portland like better than Seattle? Is there a bit of a rivalry there? This is our first time to Portland but we’ve been to Seattle like twelve times we got here like forty minutes ago.” [Punctuation omitted intentionally to convey speed at which these men spoke. Unfortunately I cannot overlap the text to convey the three of them consistently overlapping each other’s sentences.] My guess is that, between the jumping, yelling, laughing, walking, swimming, dressing and un-dressing, crowd-surfing, and animal impersonating, the trio collectively burned over 5,000 calories. The performance was action-packed, every moment a high-note, and every song a crowd-pleaser, including the “fake encore,” and the last song – a recording of “The Best” by Tina Turner to which the boys wound down (i.e., stage dived) and departed, leaving a fully recovered flock of fans behind with senses of humor properly reinstalled. 

DOWNLOAD: Das Racist - Fashion Party (ft. Chairlift) (MP3) or Follow us for more Das Racist MP3s (Twitter)

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