IV. The Music Eats The World
“Yes, of course it’s intentional. We obviously had the option and foresight to not use a seatbelt, but that misses the point. It is not real – the outside is static, the inside is static, and the seatbelt is fucking static. Everything is static, just eating away at the individual. The material world and many things within it are designed to keep us half-dead, and we’re trained to think these things are keeping us safe. We reference the weaponry of fear and our music and vision isn’t about being hard or tough, it’s about being real and raw, and feeling our shit. We counter with energy, everything is energy.”
~Flatlander of Death Grips, explaining the video for “Guillotine” to The Quietus.
I have a theory that everyone has the same initial impression to Death Grips: bewilderment with maybe a bit of dismissal. And that’s understandable; the album is such a dense thing that it can make a head spin.
I advise you listen to it with the lyrics somewhere in reach. I hate being the guy who says “stick to it,” because it’s such a ridiculous sentiment in most cases, but what Death Grips has to say is a lot more important than any “goofy” beats it may have.
What it does with it’s beats is not try to make some simple party rocking thing, or pop structure in rap form. The samples and sounds are wide ranging, disparate, taking recognizable parts of underground rock classics and merging them with crunching, shrill electronics. When you combine this with the lyrics, the world surrounding Death Grips becomes clear.
The music is scattered because it’s being consumed. They’re desperate to consume what they can get their hands on, to keep the world from rushing in on them. It’s easy to look at songs like “Spread Eagle Cross The Block” or “I Want It I Need It (Death Heated)” and dismiss them as just vulgar noise, but that vulgarity is more true to the identities people build for themselves to cope with the toxic mental and physical environment our cities are slowly turning into.
“Fuck that shit, I need that shit’s bound, to be the death of me!”
The music is just another drug, another high to keep the falsehoods of personhood around. It’s when the music drifts away from these bouncing tributes to ruining yourself that the message comes out; it’s a diagnosis of the destroyed human mind that the lower rungs of capitalist society makes and how art and music have been positioned as an aspirational ladder to nowhere. An escape. A drug.
You can get Exmilitary for free at thirdworlds.net. Listen to it, read the lyrics with it.
Fermata over Whole Rest 