An Introduction To Death Grips
The mysterious and frightening experimental rap group has captivated a small and discordant niche of music. These tracks will help you understand a group that aims to be fundamentally Unknowable
Tristan Young @talltristan
Groups or acts with brazenly obnoxious proclivities towards vitriol, chaos, and terror aren’t supposed to break into mainstream appeal. And yet somehow Death Grips did. Their punishing surrealist mania, vicious sound design, and weirdly obtuse lyrics should have pushed them far and wide from the boundaries of traditional musical discourse. How then, are these guys playing at Coachella, being featured in amendable pop culture films, and even approaching being normalized? The statistically anomalous vectors in which the Sacramento project of MC Ride (Stefan Burnett), drummer Zack Hill and engineer Andy Morin have progressed into pop culture zeitgeist may be inexplicable, but they have made it nevertheless. To some this is an exciting development; to others this is baffling and portentous. The nature of their music ensures that one’s opinion is difficult to be fully inserted into one orbit or the other. For better or worse, they are part of the conversation when it comes to the future of rap, electronica, and how experimental performance art intersects with truly problematic conduct. Death Grips is a force, but not of nature, of something far more ominous and disharmonious. You’ve no doubt heard of them, and probably have heard them at some point- you may not have enjoyed it. And yet Death Grips are supremely talented and from a twisted perspective, make excellent music. Trying to understand just what the hell is going on with their work and persona is paramount in unlocking what makes them so compelling. With that, a primer on the intransigent layers of what Death Grips is all about is in order. Let’s observe.
Death Grips The Conspiracy Theorists- Death Grips Is Online- Year Of The Snitch (2018)
As the name suggests, Death Grips is connected to everything and everything is connected. The purifying waves of distortion are annexed by a sinister and ominous array of tense string assortments, implicating something secretive and pernicious. It’s a disturbed idea of clarity clashing with a more manipulative sense of control, and MC Ride is stuck in the middle trying to make sense of the dichotomy. This track is mostly devoid of his feral outbursts, instead focusing on his hyper focused, if disjointed connecting of the strings. Ride pictures himself a cultist, in a surprising bout of self-awareness, but believes we are all purposed towards playing roles. In a subsequent verse Ride discusses the grime of commerce in the form of strip malls, the institutionalized oppression of draconian drug laws and relates it all to a “paper tiger”, lies to be exposed in other words. The breathless pace and swift linearity to the melody suggests all of these rhetorical pieces are falling into place, where in reality this likely only makes sense to Ride, which is of course requisite for any good bout of conspiratorial delusion.
Death Grips the Dystopians- Bottomless Pit- Bottomless Pit (2016)
Set to the traumatic tune of a rave that could only take place in something analogous to hell, and with lines as sociopathic like, “I’ll fuck you in half”, Bottomless Pit is oddly enthusiastic. The friction of grating synth, like a chopping current running backwards, bubbles and warbles with a syncopated finesse that persists despite its sonic brutalism. It’s a higher order of nihilism that looks at the melodic equivalent of the end times and finds narrative and musical opportunities within them. MC Ride speaks clearly and calmly as he can, articulating the idea that such deleterious tones are not the kind of tides to challenge, but rather acclimate to. Indeed his imagery is that of a rueful and hardened wanderer in a scorched landscape, resigned to his circumstances, “human flesh wreath can’t go nowhere/ too iron to rant, I lift my hammer/ drive us red, bottomless pit rising”. As all of the hypotheticals of dystopian fiction become more and plausible, Death Grips embraces this inevitability and gets ahead of the curve on sound tracking it.
Death Grips The Party Bros- I’ve Seen Footage- The Money Store (2012)
Nestled within an inscrutable catalogue of fiercely alienating textures, for some reason I’ve Seen Footage exits. It’s a surprisingly buoyant and boastful expression of gnarly but bright hooks. MC Ride’s fits and starts of verses have the vigour of a supremely amped up pep talk. The snappy drum sequencers recall a slightly sped up arrangement on an early Sleigh Bells album and few things scream rager like early Sleigh Bells. Ride is only slightly deranged and several paces more anthemic throughout the hooks. It’s the one song in their catalogue the uninitiated could hop around and sing the main hook to, so long as you get a few drinks in them first. He’s rowdy and snarling, but more enthusiastic than antagonistic in his repeated chants, “I’ve seen footage”. The guitars are detuned and distorted sure, but their melodic pathway traces what could be a theme song to a particularly riotous group of youth in revolt types, without sounding too dangerous. Hell, this song was featured in Booksmart.
Death Grips The Anarchists- You Might Think He Loves You For Your Money But I Know What He Really Loves You For It’s Your Brand New Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat- Government Plates (2013)
Just reading the name of the song and it’s clear Death Grips have ejected any form of structure or planning. The track opens with the sonic implications of melodic constructs just melting, eroding away. This song is pure unmitigated chaos; duelling ideas of insensibilities that they let simply react. The divergent strands of something akin to a melody disrupt and subsume each other. The reverb ripples like a bellowing cackle you feel more than hear. MC Ride bounces back from singing with a sense of purpose and timing to mentally projecting his steam of thought consciousness. Stressful agitation parleys into subdued rumination with no sense of logic or timing. Ride frantically screams, “I become you, opening of the mouth, unlawful possession”, insinuating his willing association with tenants that are not only heretical but dangerously unpredictable. It’s exhilarating in its defiant freedom.
Death Grips The Surrealists- Giving Bad People Good Ideas- Bottomless Pit (2016)
The mixture of hypnotic allure and visceral cacophony seems wholly incongruous and punishing at first. The perverse seduction of guest vocalist Clementine Creevy, with her cyclical dance of promises and threats, is sucked into a downward spiral pulling you into its wake and becomes oddly synchronous with the serrated and epileptic guitars. As frantically wound up synth pulses follow the path of Creevy it starts to sound like a mad scientist in the throes of discovery, or possibly delirium. MC Ride blurs into the melodic background and the deranged pop sensibilities of Creevy rise to the forefront, making what should be interminable something your body rhythm can, somehow, accommodate. The apostate zeal in which she operates defies analytics with each passionate invocation, and become more and more a statement to cult of personality. For each rule of pop conventionality they break here, they draft news one that eventually forms a gestalt of not just an otherworldly concept of pop music but one that can be understood only through a sensory level.
Death Grips The Arena Performers- On GP- The Powers That B (2015)
So much of Death Grips is an insular break down, chaotically splaying out into public ecosystems to pernicious effect, that one would be forgiven to think they are not even cognizant of the notion that they have fans that like them. Occasionally Death Grips displays the necessary modicum of external awareness that playing to a crowd is part of the gig, and they are actually quite good at it. All over the track On GP enormous, thrashing hooks are coherently and dramatically articulated on guitar as Ride follows them along with linear boasts of showman like chanting. The music crystalizes into occasional bouts of bombastic clarity as the power chords generously fill any space they happen to be occupying. Ride is still agitated and volatile, but his flow is similarly ostentatious as opposed to being straight up hostile. The repeated cycles of maudlin refrains that erupt into rapturous crescendos within the song suggest Death Grips interest in performative theatricality. This time it’s not just Ride’s overflowing pathos or paranoia, but something for the fans in attendance. Ratcheted hooks drag along his pugilistic fury that seems more purposed to pump up a crowd than to frighten them. On GP makes you actually want to go to one of their shows. You best stick to the sides though; those pits are a hell of a thing. This is still Death Grips after all.
Death Grips The Futurists: Hacker- The Money Store (2012)
Arguably their best song, and truly one of the best rap tracks of its era, Hacker is a masterpiece in content and vision- a window into the undiscovered provinces of where experimental rap can pioneer. The brazenly frantic percussive shuffles, glitch samples abounding, and patchwork sound effects are epileptic and daunting but it all carries an exhilarating sense of momentum in a way few song are capable of. The careful addition and subtraction of sonic components, creating gaps and overlaps yield a beat that traverses with unnatural grace. Its bombastic fever dream is so tonally dissonant and rattling, yet its pulsing charisma wins you over. MC Ride’s lyrics are absolutely wild, audaciously incoherent but intensely galvanizing. “You’ll catch a jpeg to the head, über reach, you’re an intern, I’m Wikileaks”, is a gregarious way to integrate unfamiliar and postmodern vocabulary into typical rap threat/hype lines. Ride imagines his conquest of genre and virality in inexplicably weird, but acutely globalized terms, “soon your crew will be serving sandwiches named after me, Vietnamese style food”. He is looking so far beyond the present moment in Hacker that modern tent poles of iconography are described as afterthoughts, “Gaga can’t handle this shit”, or ,“visit Tesla’s grave”, in a double entendre that references the past and the future. Ride keeps assuring he knows the first three numbers, likely an allusion again to Nicolai Tesla- who has been reimagined as a modern day Aristotle in his own right- in how to unlock the secrets of the universe. It’s a lot to take in. The Apple Store, Tangier, DNA analysis, and a whole lot of other weird shit articulate with passionate enormity the incongruous nature of a dissonant and partisan world being forced to coexist in increasingly precarious disequilibrium. If Hacker seems like an indecipherable riddle now, in another 10 years we may look back on it with prophetic clarity.
Death Grips The Paranoid Maniacs- Deep Web- No Love Deep Web (2012)
No quality is more emblematic of Death Grips’ pure id than rampant paranoia, and no track is more paranoid than Deep Web. It sounds like the walls collapsing inwards around each other, sucking you into a dark and oppressive chasm. The vibrating animus in the shrapnel pieces of synth feels uncomfortably claustrophobic. Within it the pronounced echoes of Ride’s shrieks mimic a concerningly small enclosure where the sound has no hope but to refract and scatter, never truly reaching where it has to. With his own vocals randomly redirecting inward he has no audience but himself, no dialogue beyond what goes on in his own anxious mind. “Call me crazy, but I swear my lines been tapped”, should dissuade anyone of the notion of interpretational reaching here. He really is that paranoid. So nervous of everything beyond his own skin -and even that offers minimal respite- he shrieks, “don’t make me take my face off”, while bemoaning the sheepish reality of everyone else. Ride is convinced he, “lives in a glass house, prepared for surprise attack”. He’s fearful of everything, ready for anything. When he spits, “realized I held the blade inside my back”, we realize he doesn’t trust even himself. Considering this song is from an album whose cover- of a phallic dick you see- was taken in the Chateau Marmont, a notorious refuge for damaged celebrities at the nadir of their mental health, it becomes all the more understandable that Ride is not equipped to exist in the real world- only an idea of his.