The last time I saw Himanshu Suri—better known as Heems—was in April 2014, when he came down to Mumbai as part of a four city India tour. The air-conditioning at Bonobo—a posh bar and venue in Bandra—had broken down, and the little room was soon awash with sweat, much of it flying off Suri as he jumped around stage with all the manic, uncontrolled energy of a hardcore one-man punk band. For over an hour, the twenty-nine–year-old Indian-American rapper from Queens in New York performed intense punk-rap songs about race, surveillance drones and New York cops to an audience full of Indian hipsters. When I bumped into him at a party later that night, he was concerned about whether the audience really got what he was saying. Apparently, the other shows on the tour didn’t go so well. As he told Spin magazine in a recent interview about the tour, it “just doesn’t translate.”
Suri is no stranger to being lost in translation. The Wesleyan University graduate first came to public attention in 2008 as a part of the New York alt-rap trio Das Racist. The group’s ironic, hyper-literate and unabashedly post-modern music was dismissed as “joke-rap” by many critics who couldn’t see beyond the stoner hilarity of their breakthrough hit “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Of course, their irreverent humour played an important part in their success, but what the critics missed out on was the angst that informed much of their music. Underneath the obscure literary references and the juvenile non-sequiturs were serious critiques of capitalism, race relations and American popular culture. Their non-white, non-black backgrounds (Suri and Ashok Kondabolu, who goes by Dapwell, are Indian-Americans, Victor Vazquez, aka Kool AD, is of Afro-Cuban and Italian descent) meant that they could bring a unique perspective to the conversations around rap and race. But despite releasing a couple of critically acclaimed mixtapes and a successful major label debut, Das Racist never quite managed to shrug off the “comedy rap” label. It’s a label that has followed Suri around since the group broke up in 2012, even as his music has gotten progressively more focused and less playful.
But even the most oblivious critic can see that in Eat Pray Thug—his first commercial solo album—Suri is deadly serious. His most personal project to date, Eat Pray Thug finds Suri digging deep into his experiences as an Indian-American in a post 9/11 America, mixing autobiography with highly charged political polemic. As he told Grantland’s Zach Dionne last August, this is “post-9/11 dystopian brown man rap.” Like most New Yorkers, the events of 9/11 had a profound effect on the sixteen-year-old Suri. He watched the planes go into the Twin Towers from his high school, only half a mile away. Later that afternoon, a construction worker would taunt a classmate wearing a hijab as they tried to make their way home. “I was there / I saw the towers and the planes,” he raps, in album highlight ‘Flag Shopping.’ “And I’ll never be the same / Never, ever be the same.”
For Suri, and his family, the grief of 9/11 was compounded by the instant, intense racism directed at the South Asian and Arab communities in its aftermath. In ‘Flag Shopping,’ which references David Foster Wallace’s famous essay, ‘The View from the Midwest,’ Suri talks about the fear and confusion they felt as their own neighbours turned against them. “I know why they mad / But why call us A-rabs,” he raps. “We sad like they sad / But now we buy they flags.” With his raw, gravelly voice radiating anger and bitterness, he documents the psychological scars this inflicted on his family (“Your dad mad cause he lost all clients / Dad, why you crying?”) and the paranoia that followed.
Suri’s razor sharp wit is still in his arsenal, but here he deploys it as a devastating weapon rather than an ironic shield. The best example of this is 'Al Q8a,' in which he plays agent provocateur with lines like “Hi haters, our guns from Al Qaeda.” It’s as ingenious as anything British South Asian rapper M.I.A has come up with, but a hint of bitterness leaks through the chant (“USA! USA! USA!”) that ends the song. And then the pathos returns in full flow in album's closing track, ‘Patriot Act,’ which shows us Suri at his most vulnerable. Here, he abandons rapping altogether for a rasping monologue on all the things that fuel his pain and anger—being called “Osama,” the frantic efforts to fit in, the fear of racist violence and police harassment, and his neighbours being deported or forced to leave the country. The track ends with a straight punch to the gut as Suri says “Those giant metal birds in the sky brought my parents here and made things confusing / and then crashed into those buildings and made things confusing / But I guess it's okay because my dad wasn't deported / And I still get to correct his English at dinner / So he doesn't raise too much attention and get labeled a troublemaker.”
Alongside the political crisis, this album is also focuses on a personal one. After the unexpected demise of Das Racist, Suri broke up with his girlfriend and began to suffer from depression, anxiety and drug dependency. He left New York for India, where he recorded the album, and the title plays on his own recourse to “spiritual tourism” as much as it refers to Elizabeth Gilbert’s memoir. Suri deals with his heartbreak and its aftermath in poignant love songs such as the Dev Hynes, aka Blood Orange, produced late-night breakup jam ‘Home’ and the future-pop cut ‘Damn, Girl.’ In the jaunty and tongue-in-cheek ‘Sometimes,’ he jokes about the contradictions and discord in his life (“Sometimes it’s nice and smooth / Sometimes it’s bust and bust”) before getting to the more serious question, “How to live life when my life all dualities?" However, interspersed among the more serious songs are flashes of the playful and humorous Heems of old, such as “So NY,” which starts with the classic line: “I’m so New York, I still don't bump 2Pac.” Then he crowns himself the Hindu Spike Lee—“Fuck the Tarantino / It’s the Hindu Spike Lee”—and pokes fun at the city’s hipster population.
Suri has been quite public about the toll Eat Pray Thug took on him, and his struggles with his label Megaforce, who refused to get clearance for Indian samples that were originally supposed to be on the record. He now has a job at an ad agency and has been making noises about moving to India and working on a novel. A few weeks ago, he hinted on Twitter that this might be his last rap album. I hope he reconsiders, because Eat Pray Thug is a fantastic debut and an important record for American rap. If rap is still “black America’s CNN,” as rapper Chuck D famously stated, then Suri has just gatecrashed the party and become its most prominent brown voice.