There are people who, at the mere mention of the name "Das Racist," will make a face like they smelled a fart. These people will then mention something about "that Pizza Hut song" -- a wound from six years ago that apparently has not adequately healed yet. Das Racist came into the game with a joke-rap reputation, something they struggled with and never entirely shook. They were relentlessly clever, sure, and sometimes willfully obnoxious too. But their music, more often than not, was about race, and about the rage and pain and anxiety that come with being brown in America. They never spelled it out for you, exactly, but something like "Puerto Rican Cousins" was an angry song disguised as a playful one. When the group broke up, Heems, the more focused and aggressive of the two rappers, made Nehru Jackets, a tense and sprawling mixtape of New York rap that brought that anxiety a little further to the fore. Even there, though, he'd undercut his own seriousness: "Heems, you should rap in earnest / But honestly, I'd rather just blow cess and watch Ernest." He must've run out of Ernest movies. There's one line that Heems brings back again and again throughout Eat Pray Thug, his first (and maybe last) commercially available solo album: "I was there, I saw the towers and the planes / And I'll never be the same / Never ever be the same." He's done playing.