The Story Behind the Greatest Fast-Food Anthem of All Time

It’s part of Fast-Food Week. It’s hip-hop history. It’s a combination fast-food week/rap history.

It’s been 15 years since the semi-satirical, pseudo-conceptual—let’s just go with unconventional—rap group Das Racist released its breakout hit, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” a four-minute saga about being at a Pizza Hut, being at a Taco Bell, and being at a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. Nothing more, nothing less. It was an instant knockout.

Released on Nov. 1, 2008, as a free download by a trio of mostly unknown college-educated stoners who named their group after a Wonder Showzen–inspired meme, the track arrived at a disruptive moment in the zeitgeist: the Great Recession, the election of Barack Obama, the peak of MySpace, the waning days of the blogosphere. Speculative capitalism was eating itself, fueling the type of anti-corporate disillusionment and anger that would power movements like Occupy Wall Street. Heretofore-ignored voices were capturing attention, allowing a brash musical group consisting of two South Asian American rappers and an Afro-Cuban Californian rocker to emerge and thrive. And the mainstream music industry was still adjusting to cyberspace and its freewheeling modes of virtual creation and distribution, allowing a parallel mediasphere to platform and distribute weird, daring music that may not have passed muster with prior gatekeepers.

At the center of these whirlwinds was a Pizza Hut where there was also a Taco Bell. The riff on this peculiar institution spotlighted the talents of Das Racist’s members—Himanshu “Heems” Suri, Ashok “Dapwell” Kondabolu, and Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez—and would help launch the careers of a dozen or so artists and inject an indelible new phrase into the lexicon.* It’s a hip-hop classic and, in its way, a fast-food classic.

The long tail of the song is complicated. Though the group would go on to success with its playful, cerebral hip-hop, they were often pigeonholed as the “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” dudes; Das Racist didn’t last long as a unit, and each of its members pursued individual creative ventures afterward. Their legacy also includes multiple sexual misconduct allegations against Vazquez, which were reported by Pitchfork in 2018. (Part of Vazquez’s response to the accusations read: “I am learning to confront myself now so that I may transform my toxic patterns for the sake of my daughter, my family and friends, my girlfriend, my community and myself. I want to utilize whatever is left of my marginal celebrity to help foster more healthy ideas of masculinity.”) Vazquez no longer performs much but releases solo works on his Bandcamp page; Suri, meanwhile, has gotten involved in artist development, and Kondabolu recently worked on an HBO reality series with the Safdie brothers.

Still, “Combination” long ago took on a life of its own, finding continual rebirth as a meme, parody template, and framework for worldly understanding. You can hardly imagine having a Fast-Food Week without it. So I recently got in touch with the members of Das Racist, the artists and producers who helped make the track, and the people who chronicled its moment in order to tell the complete story of how this “Combination” came to be.

Before there was the song, there was the place. What’s a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell? The two chains are owned by Yum Brands, the largest fast-food conglomerate in the world, which began opening “multibranding” outposts in the early 1990s as a way “to build newer or lesser-known brands” and “increase revenue,” as the New York Times wrote in 2005, as well as to save money by sharing real estate, labor, and equipment.

Victor “Kool A.D.” Vazquez: As a kid, I lived by a KFC in Hunters Point [San Francisco] that turned into a combination Taco Bell–KFC, I think, first, and then a combination Pizza Hut–Taco Bell–KFC after that, and I had always kind of tripped off it. It was kinda funny and bleak, like this manic, weirdly desperate-feeling late-capitalist lumping of brands, like a NASCAR logo collage vibe—that classic hollow American illusion of choice camouflaging a bland, toxic, junky, monolithic corporatism, a kind of P.T. Barnum snake-oil vibe, like, “Whatchu need, we got pizza we got tacos,” and finding yourself there in that no man’s land of empty promises, being stuck there, and kind of throwing up your hands like “Fuck it—we out here, I guess.”

Adam Chandler, author of Drive-Thru Dreams and Slate contributor: The trend of multibranded restaurants really took off in the early aughts. If you look at where a lot of these combination places are (and there are many fewer today than a decade ago), they are often in either high-traffic areas (train stations, highway service stations, dense urban centers) or more remote areas with limited options. And in some places, Taco Bell is thought of as lunch and Pizza Hut is thought of as dinner. So they do serve a function, just not one that many people are willing to concede is useful.

While studying at Wesleyan University in the mid-2000s, Vazquez began uploading his music to MySpace. One song was “I Zimbra,” a spare, percussive rap track “inspired by subway drummers and ‘Gadji Beri Bimba,’ ” the 1916 poem by German Dadaist Hugo Ball that also inspired a 1979 Talking Heads single.

Kool A.D.: “I Zimbra” was off my self-produced 2006 debut album called The Electric Kool A.D. Acid Test. It was all really stream of consciousness, as most of my stuff is, but a specific line just kind of popped in my head as one of many images/ideas at the time of making that song: “I’m at the Pizza Hut, I’m at the Taco Bell/ I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell/ I’ve got that taco smell, that pescado smell/ I got a lot of smells, I’ve rolled a lot of L’s … ”

Christopher Edley, director of the 2009 “I Zimbra” video and longtime collaborator with Kool A.D.: That song was exciting. It’s dirty, it’s raw, and it’s very much Victor’s rapping style—funny, lots of good wordplay, and a lot of who he is.

During the mid-2000s, Wesleyan became known as a launchpad for up-and-coming indie rock acts. Students who would later become known as members of acts like MGMT, Francis and the Lights, and Bear Hands all met at Wesleyan and began performing together on campus; Kool A.D. formed a rock group called Boy Crisis. As a resident adviser in the Students of Color for Social Justice dorm, he would befriend Himanshu Suri, a Queens-born economics major focusing on South Asian art and literature. Suri was also an enthusiastic part of Eclectic, which he described to me as “a coed society at Wesleyan that Kalifa”—Khalif Libasse Diouf, later well known as the rapper Le1f—“and I belonged to along with other creative folks like MGMT.”

Kool A.D.: Hima was a fan of Boy Crisis and front row at almost every show, but he also dug my weirdo abrasive lo-fi experimental punk rap shit I had dropped on the side.

Himanshu “Heems” Suri: Credit goes to Dylan Rau of the band Bear Hands, my roommate out of Wesleyan. This was the MySpace days, and he heard [“I Zimbra”] and highlighted its brilliance.

After graduation, Heems moved back to New York to work on Wall Street. Vazquez headed to Brooklyn, too, hoping to make it with Boy Crisis. The two became closer and soon linked up with Suri’s childhood friend, Ashok “Dapwell” Kondabolu.

Dapwell on Bullseye With Jesse Thorn, 2011: It’s never come across in interviews, how kind of incidental and random and quickly this group became a thing. It was never a decision.

Heems and Kool A.D. found they enjoyed rapping and riffing together, naming their collective Das Racist, in the style of a “That’s racist!” exclamation. They served as the lead MCs, while Dapwell acted as the hype man. Thanks to Wesleyan connections, they were able to land gigs pretty quickly.

Kool A.D.: We were living in Brooklyn but doing a show up at Wesleyan with Kalifa, who still went there. It was one of our first ones and we had only recorded like two songs together at that point. So we each just kicked old verses we had on deck or else freestyled over whatever. But at that show, I was doing the “I Zimbra” verse, got to that line, noticed a reaction to it, so I just kept repeating that line, and Hima caught on immediately and did the same, and soon everybody was singing along, so we figured we should record it.

Heems: I suggested we do the call-and-response at our show. That was a Heems show, one of my first, back at Wesleyan. Victor wanted to join me, so I brought him along, and it was co-billed with my friend Jeremy Louis-Arlet, who I was working and living with at the time. So during my show, we went into the call-and-response and it hit really well with the audience. That’s when I decided it should be its own song.

I loved Kalifa’s work as an artist and producer, and eventually would go on to manage him and release some of his mixtapes on my label Greedhead. I had a folder of his beats and the one we went on to choose was called “Ha!” I think, featuring a sample from Masters at Work’s “The Ha Dance (Pumpin’ Dubb),” which was legendary in the Black and Latino LGBTQ+ ballroom scene. I thought the concept of “Combination” was so silly that I wanted what I thought was the best beat in the folder to carry it.

Kalifa to Spin, 2012: I was kind of trolling—it’s just hilarious to give them a vogue beat! I think [Heems] kind of knew it was a vogue beat, but did he really know? He tried to pretend he knew, like, a year later, but never said anything about it.

Heems: We recorded the song with Patrick Wimberly, who was in Chairlift at the time, in his home studio in the basement of an apartment in Bushwick.

Chairlift was formed in 2005 by Caroline Polachek and two of her University of Colorado classmates. After the band decamped for Brooklyn in early 2007, fellow University of Colorado alum Patrick Wimberly replaced a departing original member, and the trio overlapped with Das Racist’s circle.

Patrick Wimberly: I saw them play a show at Galapagos in Williamsburg—I think in 2008.
There were like 12 people there. When I saw them perform “PHTB,” I was blown away. Genius. I invited them to my Bushwick studio that weekend. That’s when I decided I wanted to be a producer. I had to record this song.

They brought the beats. I had one microphone. We recorded that one in one take with both of them around that one microphone. And then recorded a bunch more. The sun was up when we finished.

Kool A.D.: We did like four or five joints that night, including, I think, “Chicken and Meat” and “Rainbow in the Dark.” We did “PHTB” in one take together, sharing one mic. People we played it for dug all of the joints from that session, but “PHTB” was definitely a favorite for a lot of folks.

Heems: The amount of time it takes to listen to the song is the amount of time it took to record it. We listened back, and I can’t recall if we felt like we had something there that would go on to be what it was, but we felt good enough about it to release it. Back then we’d upload songs to our MySpace immediately, mostly rough mixes, and not get too caught up about the mixing and mastering, etc., but were definitely in good hands with Patrick.

Wimberly: I handed them some rough mixes that night and asked them not to share because I wanted to clean up the mix a bit the next day after some sleep. Ha! It was never polished. They put it on MySpace immediately and by Monday it was already getting loads of plays.

As famed critic Robert Christgau noted in the Barnes & Noble Review: “ ‘Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell’ got noticed right away even though its lyric—underpinned by a skinny laptop beat and augmented by some interjections, a few laugh lines, and many well-placed ‘What?’s—comprises 20 repetitions of ‘I’m at the Pizza Hut/ I’m at the Taco Bell/ I’m at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.’ Many in the indie world hated it, but more loved it.”

Leonard Pierce, writer and former music critic: It was one of the first big viral hits of the social media era. It was pre-Twitter, but it was in that period when a lot of unexpected stuff bubbled up because of YouTube. Someone, probably some music-wise critic friend, pointed me to it and I ended up being one of the first million or so people to hear it. It wasn’t an incredibly groundbreaking piece of recorded art or anything, but it had a solid beat, those fun honking horns to carry the track along, and a funny, sing-along-able vocal that you wanted to listen to over and over. It was hooky and smart but light.

Chandler: As a fast-food obsessive and an American, I fondly remember when “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” took the nation by storm. I think it resonated because multibrand restaurants are such a bizarro feature of the American consumer landscape. Beyond it being catchy as hell, there’s really not much else to say about it other than these restaurants exist, which is basically the whole arc of the song. Also, purely from a craft standpoint, I think it’s critical that Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have the same number of syllables. If the song took place at a combination Taco Bell and Long John Silver’s, it would never work.

Chairlift hit it big when its song “Bruises” got featured in an iPod Nano commercial in September 2008; Das Racist would then perform at the release party for the band’s debut album. That November, the Guardian recommended both Chairlift and Das Racist as two “Brooklyn bands worth checking out” at the bottom of a profile of Boy Crisis. Going into the next year, Das Racist released more work, including the loosies “Shorty Said” and “Ring Tone,” the Greedheadz EP, and a video for “Chicken and Meat.” But “Combination” would reach even greater heights. In a March 2009 XLR8R interview, composer Dan Deacon included it as part of his “10 Poorly Juxtaposed Pieces Mixtape,” referring to “Combination” as “a track that will last the ages.” Two months later, YouTuber LetMeRave uploaded it, calling it “a shit song. I absolutely hate it.” That didn’t stop it from rapidly garnering tens of thousands of plays.

Heems: Later it would be remixed by Wallpaper, who is of course now the successful pop producer Ricky Reed, known for breaking Lizzo.

Jennifer Maerz, writer and former music critic: The Bay Area producer Wallpaper took a really fun joke song and made it something you’d want to mosh to at a dance club. I was the music editor at SF Weekly, and I did a cover story about Wallpaper that mentioned his work on the remix. I thought the song was absurd, hilarious, and ridiculously catchy.

Throughout the summer, the song’s remix got even more coverage, including a “Best New Music” designation from Pitchfork, YouTube riffs, a PerezHilton.com post headlined “This Song Is So Stoopid, but We Kinda Love It!” and a write-up from the New Yorker’s Farley Katz, then a staff cartoonist for the magazine who subsequently engaged in a “cartoon-off” with Kool A.D. Other critics hopped on board.

Heems: Rob Harvilla at the Village Voice was an early proponent of the song.

Rob Harvilla, senior staff writer at the Ringer: The first time you hear it, it doesn’t require a lot of work to wrap your head around it. It was very appealing to me in a sophomoric sort of way. So I was like, I should talk to these guys. I got in touch with Heems, if I recall correctly. It was not super hard to find them and get them to talk. I guess this was a pretty early interview for them.

Kool A.D.: I remember being on tour in the U.K. with Boy Crisis answering emailed interview questions from the Village Voice about Das Racist.

Harvilla: An email interview is not the first thing I would jump to, but I’m glad we did it this way. It’s clear that thing of me underestimating them is palpable. They’re already taking this way more seriously than I am, almost. The format was semi-dumb questions with really smart, great answers. And that’s what I was hoping would happen.

It turned out, the very things that made “Combination” such a hit—the repetitiveness, the simplicity, the corporate synergy—also boxed Das Racist in when it came to their public perception. Plenty of critics accused the group of using hip-hop as a joke, and as a means to a corporate end instead of something riffing on the very concept.

Edley: It’s hard to follow viral success, and they were both serious about rapping. I’m sure that put them in a pretty frustrating position.

Heems: I think it was more the clothing we wore, or this one thrift-shop sweater that Victor wore, that tainted people’s opinions of us as hipsters or outsiders to the culture rather than students of it. This was also a time when Danny Brown allegedly didn’t get a record deal at G-Unit because his jeans were too tight. We followed in the footsteps of artists we were fans of like MF Doom, Beastie Boys, and De La Soul. A lot of journalists didn’t get it, but many saw the throughline. I think the first time I came across the word meme was when someone used it to contextualize “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.”

“Combination” would close out 2009 mostly beloved by critics, placing No. 31 in the Village Voice’s Pazz and Jop critics poll of the best singles of the year. By that point, however, even Das Racist was ready to move on.

Maerz: I was a big fan of the brash, high-energy party anthems that were coming out in that era. Artists like Andrew W.K. and Mickey Avalon on the more punk/rock side, and Wallpaper, the Saturday Knights, and Das Racist on the hip-hop side injected the music world with much-needed levity. The trick was these guys weren’t just slapping sounds together. They had a real talent for crafting pop-leaning earworms.

Heems: We had other songs we were working on, and it didn’t necessarily feel like that one was any more special.

Kool A.D.: I was splitting my time between recording and playing shows with both Das Racist and Boy Crisis—occasionally together, even. “PHTB” started blowing up during a period of time when I had already been wined and dined a lot by various labels and prospective agents and managers, etc. Experiencing that level of hype around two different projects simultaneously was definitely hella surreal.

Eventually, after a lot of back-and-forth with the label and general bag-fumbling across the board, B-Unique had all but shelved the Boy Crisis album, and as the band kind of treaded water, Das Racist continued to gain momentum and a time came when I had to leave Boy Crisis and focus on Das Racist.

As Das Racist solidified itself as a group, it got serious about official releases. Just after performing at South by Southwest in March 2010, the group dropped its first free mixtape, Shut Up, Dude. The tape included both known tracks (“Combination”) and more than a dozen new ones (“Ek Shaneesh,” “Who’s That? Brooown!”). The trio then followed up that critically acclaimed project in September with Sit Down, Man—also a free tape, but a much more substantial one, with featured verses and beats from rap heavy-hitters like Boi-1da, Roc Marciano, and El-P. The two projects established Das Racist on the scene, elevating them to appearances with Anthony Bourdain and landing them on several best-of-2010 lists—making it clear the group wasn’t a gimmick.

Pierce: I got their two albums when they came out. I thought they were pretty good, although if you thought they’d be like “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” you’d be pretty disappointed. Similar sonic palette but really different styles, lyrics.

Edley: “PHTB” and a song like “You Can Sell Anything” [from Sit Down, Man] are two identical sides of the same coin: about how dumb we all are, and how clever we all are, at the same time.

2011’s Relax would be Das Racist’s first and final album, as the group split up the following year. Suri released solo work and joined with producer Redinho and actor Riz Ahmed to form the group Swet Shop Boys; he also went on to work at companies like Spotify, Audiomack, and ONErpm, and this year, he founded a new India-themed media venture titled Veena. Vazquez kept putting out massive amounts of music, both solo and in other groups, while branching out into other creative ventures like visual artistry and writing.

However, both Das Racist and “Combination” remained a fond memory for critics and listeners alike. Stereogum’s Tom Breihan noted in 2012 that the group “carved out for themselves a new place on the rap landscape, existing at the center of an ever-expanding circle of sharp and distinctive rap voices,” like “El-P, Danny Brown, Roc Marciano, Action Bronson, Despot, Mr. Muthafuckin’ eXquire, Young L, Childish Gambino, Le1f, Lakutis.” In 2016, Pitchfork ranked Sit Down, Man as one of “The 50 Best Rap Mixtapes of the Millennium.”

I asked everyone I spoke with what they thought the legacy of Das Racist and “Combination” was.

Heems: Das Racist probably stands in the annals of blog rap history and “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell” stands in the annals of meme history.

Kool A.D.: I think [Das Racist] existed in a time when the internet was transforming the music industry and culture at large and so everything about the project reflects that environment and is very much of that time. Older models were being disrupted and ideas around genre and marketability and “what works” and what was allowed and what was possible were all dissolving and mutating and we thrived in that chaos.

Edley: Back then, politics had such a strange feeling. There was a possible feeling of forward momentum after Bush, but during the financial crisis, nobody felt like they were going to make any real money. Still, culture felt very rich, so you kinda lived for culture. This song was more a response to that than a symptom. We didn’t have any sane reference point to measure absurdity against. There was this feeling of freedom and hopelessness, and here was a stupid song about something so stupid. Yet in its really stupid way, it’s incisive. It’s a fantastic and absurd critique, and that’s why it has staying power.

Maerz: Music conceived at a party, created for people who also like to party, that also makes you laugh is a win-win-win. I listen to that song now and can still picture the dive-bar dance floors packed with sweaty revelers singing along—and the echoing a cappella versions that rang out whenever we rounded the corner of a Pizza Hut–Taco Bell.

Heems: I spoke with a former manager of Lizzo recently whose only familiarity with Ricky Reed when they all started working together was “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” and he mentioned the song as an entry point for him to greenlight their collaboration.

Wimberly: [“Combination”] was the beginning of my entire production career. It was the moment I realized I wanted to help artists make records that I believe are magnificent and unique. I moved from engineering to producing/writing. Since then, I’ve worked with MGMT, Solange, Joji, Beyoncé, Lil Yachty, Blood Orange, and many others. [Das Racist] were the first ones to give me a chance.

Kool A.D.: The song has been compared to the Beastie Boys’ “Cooky Puss”: an unassuming joke song that was career-launching, that still hits on, like, a sort of art level, and worked as like a brick through the window or like a grappling hook onto the ivory tower of industry success that afforded an opportunity to make interesting, kinda left-of-center music with higher visibility.

Chandler: I think we’re in the greasy aftermath of the traditional dual restaurant trend; they absolutely still exist, but a combination of rising trends like delivery, digital ordering, customization, and ghost kitchens have made fast-food companies look at efficiency differently.

Heems: I genuinely like Taco Bell and Pizza Hut and it took me a while to be OK with that again after the song. I can’t really hear the word combination anymore without cringing. I probably get recognized as Heems now more than “the Pizza Hut/Taco Bell guy” since I do a lot of other shit and have made a lot more music since then.

Kool A.D.: Haven’t had that shit in years, and I barely even ate it back then, it was just something I vibed on in the abstract, ha. You would be hard-pressed to find me at a Pizza Hut or a Taco Bell or a combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, but I still get recognized here and there. It’s not just “PHTB” that comes up, a lot of the time people will mention other Das Racist joints like “You Oughta Know” or “Rainbow in the Dark” or “Amazing” or “The Last Huzzah,” and a lot of people bring up Kool A.D. joints like “Manny Pacquiao,” “Moneyball,” or “Dum Diary,” often any number of even deeper cuts. I got like 90-something albums, so I have a small but strong cadre of lunatic weirdos who fuck with me heavy (shout to them, much love).

Even though I don’t do too many shows nowadays, when I do, I’ll often do “I Zimbra” live and loop the “Pizza Hut/Taco Bell” part for the people. There was something kind of ineffably real there. And maybe that’s what people were connecting to and why it’s had the long tail it’s had.

Indeed, “Combination” has had a long tail, surfacing and resurfacing in Tumblr memes, news media headlines, and even a TikTok template that spread across the platform in late 2020 and early 2021.

Wimberly: I feel like it’s gone viral like five or six times since its release. It’s hard to keep up. I am never surprised when it resurfaces.

Lyric Gray, TikTok creator who made a popular “Combination” riff: I had never heard of it before TikTok. I believe I originally saw it in a video about having ADHD as well as depression and them canceling each other out in some way. The song got stuck in my head immediately. I actually only recorded a video with it because it was all I could think of when browsing sounds to use.

I thought of the “parents passing down disorders” joke because I had a conversation about genetic mental illnesses with friends a few hours before I recorded it, but I’m in no way taking credit for that becoming a repetitive theme, because I think that’s where a lot of people’s minds went with the trend. It was actually my first video to really blow up and get my account on the For You page. Kinda owe a lot to that video and the sound.

I think it blew up because it was catchy and extremely flexible with the range of niches it could be used with. It shows for itself with the thousands of types of creators using it. I still see content using it to this day, and I’m on a completely different side of TikTok now than I was when it originally gained traction on the platform.

Heems: It was cool the song has its own legacy and continues to be a language for others. I also appreciated the little bump in royalties I saw.

Das Racist and “Combination” remain beloved even up through 2023. Open Mike Eagle shouted out both Heems and Kool A.D. on his most recent album, and Twitter/X revived collective memory of the track when a rare tropical storm approached Los Angeles in August, possibly to be accompanied by an earthquake.

Edley: [“Combination”] is referenced as a form to this day. You see that meme form, essentially, on Twitter all the time—usually about other stuff, yet everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Wimberly: I don’t think we’ve seen the last time that that song will go crazy viral.

On a recent summer evening, I biked from my Brooklyn neighborhood to Jamaica, Queens, to visit the neighborhood’s famous combination Pizza Hut–Taco Bell, marked on Google Maps as a “place of worship.” After about an hour, I got there, and it was glorious, small Pizza Hut and Taco Bell logos located outside, although the latter’s branding carried the day both inside and out. Incidentally, it sits across from a Chipotle whose building just happens to overlap with that of a Panda Express.

When I entered the buzzing, messy spot, I thought I’d order a sufficiently Taco Bell–Pizza Hut fusion order and then make a little joke to the cashier about, you know, that whole thing. There was one issue, however.

Nitish Pahwa: Could I order a Fiesta Veggie Burrito and, hmm, some breadsticks, please?

Cashier: Pizza is not open.

Pahwa: Oh wait, is this closed?

Cashier: No, just closed for the day today.

Pahwa: How come?

Cashier: I’m not sure, I think the pizza machine is broken or something, I don’t know. You can still order from this side, though.

She pointed to the Taco Bell menu up above, and I settled for my burrito and a blue raspberry Freeze. In spite of the disappointment, I felt just fine. Because I was at the Pizza Hut. I was at the Taco Bell. I was at the combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.