The title of Himanshu Suri’s debut LP, Eat Pray Thug, is a joke. Taking an artifact of mainstream American pop culture and putting a “gangsta rap” spin on it is a move straight from the playbook of Das Racist, Heems’ old rap group. The group was famous for making jokes about mass culture and politics in order to criticize institutional racism and to amuse themselves. Compared to Himanshu’s earlier music, Eat Pray Thug offers a lot less humor, but it still has plenty of pointed commentary on race in America.
Heems achieves broad political resonance through introspection, dealing frankly with the relationship between his dark past and complicated present. Most notably, Heems, who saw the towers fall from his high school in lower Manhattan, recounts both the psychological and political trauma of September 11, which triggered waves of racism against his South Asian-American community. The most beautiful moments on the album emerge when Heems depicts his pain in a way that is brutally honest. He still uses humor to get his point across—there are some good punch lines and a couple punny song titles. Yet these instances of comedy give way to an irony that is less funny, more dark.
On “Flag Shopping,” for example, Himanshu uses the memory of his parents shopping for an American flag as an example of the complex identity politics faced by South Asian immigrants after 9/11. His parents’ sincerity and hope is undermined by the instrumental’s unsettling piano fill and sinister trap beat. The contrast highlights a tragic hypocrisy that Heems explores with poignant, simple lyrics.
Eat Pray Thug marks Heems’ risky foray into singing (not rapping) love songs, but his voice holds up, and the true missteps on this album occur mostly when the lyrics get too contrived or lazy. Still, the album remains coherent in spite of its eclectic subject matter and style, thanks to the consistently good production and, especially, to Himanshu’s distinct persona. By the time the album closes with a spoken-word elegy to the victims of post-9/11 jingoism, its title has transformed from a flippant pun to a pithy summary of a tragic fate: Eat Pray Thug is about people condemned as thugs and terrorists by their neighbors, who can no longer eat, nor pray, in peace.