Let’s have a war! We haven’t had a war in ages! Come on, let’s have a war!…

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[6.00]Martin Skidmore: I haven’t made up my mind about them. At times there is something deeply interesting about what they are doing, at other times they just irritate. Their approach to music and lyrics and flow are all distinctive, which is valuable, but I don’t think it always works. This is fun and oddly thought-provoking, but I am not keen on the instrumentation.
[6]

David Moore: There are a several factors worth considering when trying to understand why this seemingly throwaway novelty has somehow been such an enduring, even transcI’M AT THE PIZZA HUT! I’M AT THE TACO BELL! I’M AT THE COMBINATION PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! I’M AT THE PIZZA HUUUUUUUT, I’M AT THE TACO BEEEELLL….I’M AT THAT COMBINATION PEE-ZA HUT’N’ TAH-CO BELL. (i’m at the PIZZA hut. i’m at the TACO bell. i’m at the COMMMMbination PIZZA hut and TACO bell.)
[10]

Tal Rosenberg: PIZZA HUT! COM-BI-NATION PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! TACO BELL! COMBINATION COMBINATION! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! I GOT THAT PESCADO SMELL! Greatness lies at the heart of the absurd. TACO BELL! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL! COMBINATION TACO BELL! PIZZA HUT! PESCADO SMELL! I ROLL A LOTTA Ls! PIZZA HUT AND TACO BELL!
[9]

Chris Boeckmann: After hearing this song, I told a lot of my friends about it. It took me, oh, 12 hours to regret that decision. Somehow I doubt I’m alone. This is how shit like “The Macarena” happens. I don’t know how, but we just barely escaped pop culture catastrophe.
[2]

Martin Kavka: Can the subaltern rap? Not these guys. Can privileged diasporic kids pull the wool over NY critics’ eyes by dropping the names of various theorists of race and postcolonial identity? Sadly, yes.
[1]

Chuck Eddy: Definitely wins the Best Song Of 2009 By Any Duo That Wrote A Halfway Coherent Response to a Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker Essay About The Death Of Hip-hop Award. And it’s also one of the year’s best songs, period, thanks at least as much to the sound — the utter off-kilter dance-punk propulsion of the guitars/horns/voices in the Wallpaper remix — as to the water-torture lyrical conceipt that unsurprisingly aggravates novelty haters so much. Me, I’m a novelty lover, and what this mostly reminds me of is “Cookie Puss,” the Beastie Boys’ very first rap single from 1983, which was probably no more or less legitimately hip-hop than this is. But I don’t expect these guys will ever make any records I love more than this one.
[9]

Matt Cibula: Oh, the war within me about this song. Suffice it to say that the bad guy won and got to rate this blurb.
[7]

Ian Mathers: Wasn’t this a sketch on Mad TV? One point for the “that taco smell, that pescado smell” part, which was at least funny the first time.
[1]

Jonathan Bradley: Das Racist stop just barely short of sensical here; their musical “Who’s on First” skit doesn’t actually include a punchline. Even if one of the guys is thinking Pizza Hut, and the other is thinking Taco Bell, it shouldn’t take this much talk to clear up their precise location; these collaborative franchises tend to make clear both chains are represented within their walls. The joke, if it is a joke, works at a liminal level; the gag disappears if you see it anywhere but out of the corner of your eye. Yet maybe this is merely evidence of my desire to contrive cleverness out of grand stupidity: “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” really works because its shouted confusion and insistent funk bass is distinctly reminiscent of the experience of ending up in a crowded fast food restaurant after a night out. There’s a lot of noise, people are yelling at each other trying to work out what’s happening now and what’s going to happen next, and amidst fluorescent lights, fast-food grease and barely-appetizing odors, the party goes on.
[10]

Alex Macpherson: I hate comedians so much. Dude speaks like he’s mugging to the camera like a twat, and with every new line — particularly the hahas — I purse my lips further in disgust. There is nothing to this unnecessarily extended skit beyond the joke, and the joke isn’t funny. KM fucking T.
[0]

Edward Okulicz: If you had to listen in on the conversation in person, you’d want to throttle one or both of Das Racist but, man, when Wallpaper’s FAT CHUNKY RIFF OF DEATH comes in, it’s pretty much play along and love it, or turn into a ranting ball of hate at how astonishingly inane it all is. I choose love.
[9]

Kat Stevens: When I clicked on that link back in April, I’m not sure why I kept listening past the first 44 seconds of tuneless dumb stoner wailing. But I’m so glad I did – at second number 45 the track explodes into furious Pigbag ska-bosh, converting anxiety and revulsion into mirth and celebration. And countless internet memes which I feel partially responsible for kicking off (sorry). I doff my hat to Wallpaper: they have polished a turd so hard it’s turned into a glorious titanium Colossus.
[10]

John Seroff: Not since Gay Bar has a novelty song been so meaningless, loopy and exciting. A lot of the appeal is in the rumbling low-rider roll of droning synth-sax, sandy percussion and hot-dogging power-chord guitar; even sans lyrics this is still a stoner movie soundtrack waiting to happen. But I suspect the lynch-pin is in the pronunciation; the constant repetition of “COMbinashun piece’a huh ‘n’ takkabell” ouroboros past rationality into a pretzel of nothing that’s just as nutty and stoopid as Lexie Mountain’s Hot Dogs but much more catchy. Quoth the band: “At one of our first shows, we just started repeating that line over and over and people seemed to like it, because people seem to like dumb shit. I know I like dumb shit.” Forget Jamaica Avenue, this party is on at the corner of Alfred Jarry and Dr. Demento. Bring your own weed.
[8]

Erika Villani: Okay, true story: I was hanging out with my two best friends, Stephanie and Jaime (who lives in Brooklyn), and we had spent the whole Saturday sitting on my bedroom floor, sharing two pizzas, two pints of Ben & Jerry’s, and a few six-packs of blackberry beer while we listened to Hannah Montana and our favorite songs from High School Musical 3. When we ran out of Disney Channel music, I was like, “You know what you guys have to hear?” and played them this and Cazwell’s “I Seen Beyonce” back-to-back. Jaime borrowed my MacBook so she could Tumblr about it, then spent five minutes giggling to herself and said, “Oh, Internet,” and I took my MacBook back so I could Tumblr about that. And the whole time, Stephanie was @replying celebrities on Twitter. So, in conclusion, this is either the best or worst song in the whole world, and I honestly can’t tell which.
[5]

Anthony Miccio: Less than the sum of its parts.
[1]

Rodney J. Greene: Nothing against electro novelties on principle, but this could only benefit from less crazy stupid vocals and more crazy stupid beats.
[4]

Frank Kogan: The absurdist routine is already impossible to fend off when, 44 seconds in, the Wallpaper guys turn this into goth funk and do serious damage; meanwhile the Cheecher and Chonger in the spotlight continue emphatically not to get their bearings.
[9]

Jordan Sargent: What’s great about this is that it plays out like an extended introduction sequence for a superhero TV show where the heroes get too stoned to even coordinate their good samaritan endeavors. And the ridiculousness is both funny and not cloying, the way the middle verse just devolves into near incoherence -— “I got that taco smell” -— is pretty much the humor that you get when this amount of marijuana is involved. Which is why I can understand if people find this annoying, but I love it.
[8]

Anthony Easton: In a world of 3OH!3 I remain unconvinced of the genius of Das Racist.
[5]