Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a fresh, deceptively personal hip-hop record.
Genre: Hip-Hop
Label: Mass Appeal
Release Date: February 16, 2024
Vibe: ☺️
In its 50-plus-year history, hip-hop has grown into a global force. Though the genre still presents itself as quite Americanized on the world stage, records like Lafandar are a great reminder of why different perspectives are so critical. Veteran emcee Heems, a Punjabi American hailing from Queens, teams with producer Lapgan for an LP that combines a laid-back atmosphere with a pervasive self-awareness of what it feels like to be the “other” in a genre that hasn’t always been welcoming to outsiders. As part of Das Racist, a mixtape duo who grappled with this issue in thought-provoking ways, Heems isn’t a stranger to being typecast. His razor-sharp writing on this record is part of his attempt to claw back against those stereotypes and, in his own way, get to the heart of the genre’s multicultural appeal.
A surface-level vibe check reads as unrushed, slacker-ish, and, if you wanted to take it a step further, vaguely ridiculous. Heems serves up bars that range from clever (“I’m a child of immigrants/ [I] speak the mother tongue but I’m illiterate”) to verbal slapstick (“I keep mixing my Vs and Ws up”). It’s meant to be silly, but as in every great satire, there are more than a few drops of truth in the underlying narrative, which came across as intensely personal. In that same vein, there’s the recurring “Himanshu” tag, a reference to the rapper’s real name spoken in a distinctly homespun manner. Add the sparkling instrumentals, which use various Indian and Middle Eastern records as sample material, and you end up with an atmosphere that sounds fresh and lived in, if only because so few hip-hop records dare to step outside of well-worn tropes that you and I have heard many times before.
It’s not that I want the genre’s sonic staples to fade into the ether—far from it. What I will say is that we need more diversity among the rap albums that make it onto lists of the best releases in a given year. Lafandar deserves to be among them.
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