Death Grips Is Online
0:04 There's a tradition in Western thought that began with the ancient philosopher Aristotle and which took over society in the Middle Ages that the height of human experience is reason. And if that's still the way we look at humanity now, Death Grips' view of humanity is the exact polar opposite. [Music]
And that's not even my analysis of the bed, that's coming almost word-for-word from the band's frontman, MC Riot. He, Zach Hill in the drums, and Flatlander, Any More than the synth, do whatever they want with their music, and as opposed to reasoned, structured music, they create this gnarled, twisted sound that's present in almost everything they make.
If you don't know who Death Grips is, and if I really had to give a basic definition, they're an experimental hip-hop group from Sacramento that's been putting out albums since about 2011, some of which are sample based and sound
1:06 a lot like hip-hop, others of which are more synth based and almost sound as if they're trance, while others might take the band's own recordings and then sample them. And to that effect, every single album has its own unique sound and style to it that's barely even replicated in the others. Ex-military, a more sampling based album, sounds absolutely nothing like the powers-that-be, neither of which sound like Crouching Tiger Hidden Gabbar mega mix, which itself is just one huge 20-minute song.
And that's exactly what Ride wants out of the band. He describes their progression not as being lateral, but forward — always engaging in new composition styles, always experimenting. But even then, there's always some elements of their music that you hear across the board. Take the literal musicality of their sound, for example: whether they're sampling or synthesizing, the music is chaotic or gnarled, as I've said before. Example: BB Poison. [Music] You can hear multiple rhythms going back-to-back, what sounds like a BB gun in there, pence the name, rapid succession
2:06 of disparate tones it's all over the place part of that is because of the band's drummer Sac Hill he's responsible for the drumbeats behind the songs and they're insane live performances but it also comes from flatlander on the synthesizer I took an extra cue from Vox for this video and sat down with an actual musician to help me understand how this chaos is actually being made what's interesting as a band is Death Grips never tries to use chord progression structures none of the [ __ ] on average and everyday music and that's that's very apparent that's easy to pick up on but what's interesting is once you get down to Flatlanders synthesizer usage is what fascinated me right from the start it is all one note tones being put through different sequences and arpeggios and different MIDI controllers in other words all of this is being done with somewhere between two to five notes let's take one of the most famous songs get got for example that's actually one
3:09 handed melody, very easily sequenced on one hand on his lower synth. But then you think, what's with all the craziness in the top part? Insane amounts of arpeggiation between the notes going crazy. [Laughter] [Music] One note arpeggiated sounds like this. You had more, you get an easy amount of chaos and craziness at your fingertips by just using three knobs: amount, and where that our pre she asian goes, eighth note that it's splitting on, and the rate in which it's going.
More than all of this, though, Right screaming also unifies
4:09 the music. And even though it's what the bands known for, Ride still experimented with that, too, in the band's second album of The Money Store, we're in the opening song he's not even screaming at all. Mastered, that's just by phone, laying in bed, this mess in mine, and they said with a distress.
It's not even to mention a Ride when he's live — meant he is screaming in the mic so passionately you can see the veins and his muscles flexing. In case you can't tell, he's kind of weird and we don't really know why. His past is pretty much completely offline, which, considering the fact he's 40 years old, is as about insane as the fact he's doing this. Though like Zach Hill in Flatland Earth, we know he's an artist and a pretty good one, too. And if you've seen any of the group's music videos, you can tell. [Music] [Applause] [Music]
Call them obscurantist, called a modern-art, I don't care. They put effort into them in ways that you have to do a bit of digging to really appreciate. Consider the video for their song Beware.
5:14 the chorus for the song deals with sight and light so in the video the biggest visual motifs deal with sight and light you can see ride outside lights on lights out but you also see these weird strobing patterns throughout the video - now is this their intended meeting behind these motifs I don't know no one does because ride and the other bandmates don't really share the meaning behind their songs or their videos so when people discuss it it's kind of a [ __ ] show though we do know at least that in their most famous music video which you might have seen are anything rides wearing of a seatbelt is representative of the band's philosophy that everything society does to quote keep us safe really keeps us half debt so the band solution is to counter that with real raw energy sometimes that means showing a video of a guy wiping himself sometimes that means sampling Charles Manson and sometimes it means putting a video inside a visual stage which cross-references lyrics that are critiquing consumer hype culture stadium style all while wearing abnormally sized googly eyes you kind of have to vibrate higher understand it part of what makes their passion more than just pretentious
6:14 ego inflation or it inflation I guess is little stuff like that that's just so freaky and outlandish or in the case of the title to their opening track of year of the snitch referencing that freakiness or outlandish myths in the lyrics not only does it then become a meme among the people that listen to the music but then the band goes and makes it a meme - and they can do it and people are gonna laugh because some of their lyrics are just golden and also because they've been in the public eye for some of the weirdest stuff you could think of you might think of a bands big break is signing a record deal getting promotion add space you know usual stuff for Death Grips they got a record deal proceeded to leak their own music onto 4chan while in the deal ended the deal and then rag Don the producers who sign them in the album they released their after why artistry passion doing what they want to do in a way they kind of screw with their audience when it comes to a good few of their lyrics just because some of them are tongue-in-cheek other times they choose to reference a meme that Zak put on Twitter and that people proceeded to analyze for hidden meaning which the
7:16 band then made fun of, which is kind of crap, because a lot of what they do put in their lyrics is just so esoteric that it makes no sense at all, and not even in a Mimi kind of way. Some of this is practically poetry that you really need to read word for word to appreciate. So was it wrong for people to [ __ ] bricks when they saw it won't lit? Maybe, but maybe not.
There are themes to the way these guys write their lyrics, themes which dictate the way entire passages of lyrics can be interpreted. One hermeneutic interprets the majority of their lyrics as the rants of a neurotic schizophrenic. And if you look at some of their songs in this way, you'll find references to mood swings, electroshock therapy, paranoia — a lot of paranoia.
But then again, you could also interpret their music as social commentary about the decadence of sexual intercourse and the decline of inter personal autonomy due to the growth of the internet. Who would have thought?
But then again, you could also interpret their music as religious an occult commentary. And again, if you interpret the music this way, you're gonna find references to pentagram sigils and even the Emerald Tablet of Hermes, which alludes to finding divine enlightenment. And you may ask yourself,
8:17 how did I get here? How is this going to constitute references to ancient Hermetic occultism? Well, I'll show you. Let me take you down one rabbit hole in this long black quarterback featuring Bjork.
The first verse is a denigration of established societies and their power structures. A Xerox man dressed in gauze and spider silk is a policeman, a mustachio showered with applause despite squishing out packets like taco sauce, which is presumably beating people until they bleed. They are swine, which wouldn't be the first time Ride referred to cops in this way in his music — he did so in click when he called them a gang. It's pretty clear he's fed up with the fried calls himself a black quarterback in the hood, likely as a means to ironically defy this establishment. He's on a black quarterback, he's writing angry paranoid poetry.
Instead, he likens himself to Eddie, who is crazy. Who is Eddie? Edward Aleister Crowley, infamous 20th century occultist accused of child sacrifice, but more importantly for Ride, also famous for his dictum "do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law", which refers to the channeling of the divine will to achieve enlightenment. Wright implicates
9:18 this dictum in the very next phrase, referencing Crowley's notion of the iana chorus wherein his victim will become law. According to Crowley, the famous magical incantation "abracadabra" would in the new Aeon be replaced by "abracadabra", but Ride possible uses the old version to underscore the abrogation of need — a reference to crowns quote, "abrogate are all rituals, all ordeals, all words and signs".
Oh, we're not done. Abracadabra has its root the Greek word Abraxas, which depending on the part of the PDO you look at, can either be in a cult angel, God, or demon. Why is that significant? Because Abraxas is name drop in Get Got, and he references other Egyptian gods in other songs.
So what's all that amount to? In my opinion, Ride is just likening himself to kraut, creating a new era of music which, like he's admitted to, glorifies the human will and its passions. He calls himself a formula [ __ ] putted executor of the cookie-cutter who's licking through master. But that's just one interpretation. You could look at the song literally as a drug addict trying to fight a cop. You could also look at
10:18 the song as Ride trying to fight his inner demons. Why does he write like this? I don't know, I'm not him. If I had to guess, I'd say he does it for the same reason that he and the rest of the band make all their music: they've got something to say and they're gonna say it the way they want to. Esoteric and kind of pretentious as it may seem, in their music theory, in their personalities, in their actions, and in their lyrics, they go beyond doing things for any one reason. They do it merely because they want to, they have a passion for it, and to me, that's Death Grips.
This is Mr. Amazing. Thanks for watching.
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