Heems: Nehru Jackets

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Himanshu Suri—better known as Heems—is a bright guy with a big mouth, as adept at popping off on Twitter rants as he is crafting verses as one-third of the literate, absurdist rap group Das Racist. Suri’s brain doesn’t have an “off” switch, and he tends to work best with a big, messy canvas. This is one of the great things about Internet mix-tape culture: rappers can test new ideas with periodic data dumps shaped into rough album form with the sort of unfettered sprawl previously associated with prog rock. Nehru Jackets, Suri’s first “solo” tape, is just that: a messy, occasionally brilliant online opus that attempts to compress the entirety of Queens, and Suri’s life there as the son of Indian immigrants, into 74 minutes.