You have to forgive an act a bad show or two. Technical difficulties happen, bands get drunk, sometimes you just have an off night. And really, if your favorite band only ever played technically perfect shows, odds are your favorite band is a bore.

So let me begin this review of Das Racist’s hot mess of a show last Friday at Chop Suey by saying I ain’t mad at them—cue concerned parent voice—just disappointed.

In January of this year, Das Racist, who had one novel hit at the time, wrote an essay for the Village Voice’s year-ending Pazz & Jop critics poll about what it meant to be “internet famous.” (Basically: it’s a’ight.) At Chop Suey, the group looked that much closer to IRL fame, but it was hard to tell how a’ight with it they really were. The show had lines down the block at 9pm. Inside, a camera crew wandered around, occasionally illuminating the more extroverted members of the audience and later following Das Racist’s Victor Vazquez, Himanshu Suri, and Ashok Kondabolu as they glad-handed with fans. Onstage, though, things were less smooth.

It was the Brooklyn-based, Seattle-affiliated (via Blue Scholars) crew’s second sold-out show here in as many months, but rather than repeating the crazy charge of last month’s performance at the Comet, or even just running a cool victory lap, Das Racist faltered. They flubbed a few lines or else dropped them entirely; Suri outran beats while Vazquez got breathless and let them get away from him. Worse, though, the music kept dropping out entirely, leaving the MCs to rap a few lines a capella, the crowd cheering them on, before calling a song off early or starting it over or both. “Rapping 2 U” died, revved back up with a peal of mic feedback, and then died again.

The band members reacted to the difficulties differently, with Vazquez and Kondabolu exchanging funny faces and bemused grins while Suri wandered the stage or leaned forward, hanging from the rafters, looking puffy-eyed and faded. At one point, Suri responded to the dead air with intense, mantra-like repetition, telling the crowd, "It's very complicated it’s very complicated it’s very complicated it’s very complicated.” (Actually, it was pretty simple: someone—and the stage was crowded with DR’s “Hidmo crew”—kept accidentally unplugging the DJ’s power supply.) Vazquez advised, “Go home now. If you’re even a little bit tired, go home.” (The packed crowd did thin slightly over the course of their set.) The music cut out on “You Can Sell Anything,” and some boos started to crop up amidst the more encouraging cheers. Suri spat out a string of words that sounded like, "allrightallrightwehadsometechnicalproblemsbutwegettingitrightwhateverwhateverwhateverwe’lhaveagoodtime.”

They did “Hugo Chavez,” the music cut out again, and they started over again. The DJ was waving dancers away from his table, looking tense. But they finished the song successfully, and it felt like a small triumph. They’d announced earlier that they’d be playing 11 songs, but at this point, after only a half dozen, they shrunk the set, saying, “We got one or two more,” then, “We got one song left, we gotta do it.” The song was “You Oughta Know,” and at least it sounded huge, the bass vibrating the whole place. The song’s chorus is a Billy Joel rip, with Suri and Vazquez jabbering nonsense over the lyrics before clearing their throats to end the show with the sneer, “Is that all you get for your money?” Brown Johnny Rotten, the ’78 Pistols. You feel cheated?

They encored with “Rainbow in the Dark,” and, again, with the technical difficulties solved, they were able to snatch some not insubstantial success from the show’s earlier defeats. We did, after all, have that good time. Significantly, they never played "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell," which they encored with at the Comet, changing the lyrics at one point to, "You like this song/we hate this song"—for all the difficulties of translating Internet fame to real life success and stoner rap insularity to solid crowd-rocking, they seemed to be announcing that at the very least, their novelty phase was over.

(Two final caveats: 1. Das Racist’s early NYC shows were apparently well known for their aggressive sloppiness and audience baiting, so there's that. 2. It’s always a good idea at a show to be as fucked up as the performers are or at least appear to be—at the Comet, I was fully on board; on Friday, trying to take care of a cold, I was regrettably sober. Maybe if you were drunk and up front, it felt like a different sort of show, I don’t know.)

The full set list:

"Who's That? Brooown!"
"Don Dada"
"Amazing"
"Rapping 2 U"
"You Can Sell Anything"
"Hugo Chavez"
"You Oughta Know"

Encore
"Rainbow in the Dark"

Update: I think they may have also attempted "Hahahaha JK?" at one point, but I don't recall where it was in the set list. Crowd-source powers, activate!