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Music

Were Death Grips Heroes or Horseshit?

As the now defunct band announce the release date of their final album, Jenny Death, two guys argue about their legacy.

All photography by Paul Sethi

Last weekend, Death Grips announced that they'd finished what will be their final release, Jenny Death, the second half of their double album The Powers That B. At Noisey, we've had some decidedly mixed opinions about the Sacramento band, and so instead of eulogizing their for-real, no fakesies retirement or gleefully dancing on their grave because half of staff hates them, we decided to do both. Noisey UK Associate Editor Joe Zadeh and Noisey Features Editor Drew Millard chatted back and forth about the relative merits of Death Grips, and they ended up with this.

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Joe Zadeh: Hi, I'm Joe. In 2011, I fell for Death Grips in a big way. They only really existed for four years, but I gleaned more rousing emotion and psychological refuge from those 48 months of rage than I ever have from talking about my feelings.

This is a band who pissed off a major label to leak their music for free, got their videos shown in LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and launched a cryptographic alternate reality game on the darknet to promote new music. Bjork, of all people, wrote letters of support to these battle-ready rap/rock n’ roll art heathens, and even lent her voice for Niggas on the Moon, the first installment of Jenny Death.

But the Sacramento band were a divisive bunch, and their antics didn’t always please everyone. Cancelled tours, no-shows, dick pics, whole advances spent on two-month stays at the legendary Los Angeles hotel Chateau Marmont, and a mixed relationship with the major label model resulted in many fans and critics questioning their priorities, memorable or not.

So, Drew… why the FUCK don’t you like Death Grips?

Drew Millard: It's not that I dislike Death Grips per se, it's just that I feel like the band distills a lot of complex ideas about art and culture (ideas that, for the record, I generally agree with) in a way that inadvertently reveals they don't necessarily have the most sophisticated grasp on the ideas they're trying to communicate. Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with that—it’s not an artist’s job to talk to me about politics, it’s their job to make songs, and if people get some greater point from them, great—but Death Grips just aren't that interesting to me. There's nothing for me to really latch on to, sonically, and then the paucity of coherent rhetoric really turns me off. But, hey, that’s just me.

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Which is not to say that all music has to be tuneful, or have a strong message. It's just that, for all the hemming and hawing about how Death Grips are progressive and intelligent, there's just not that much "there" there. Yeah, they found themselves in a major label system that was not suited to offering them the sorts of freedoms that would be conducive to them making their label back their money, or even making a halfway decent album, and the shit they did in reaction to that was certainly provocative and probably justified, but for what? So they could make the albums they wanted to, certainly. But I thought those albums were both abrasive and uninteresting. Of course, being “challenging” is kind of the point of Death Grips, but, hey. If you don’t fuck with something, you don’t fuck with it. And that’s where I am.

Death Grips feel like a hip-hop group designed to appeal to people who don't actually like hip-hop, or who, even worse, think that "progressive hip-hop" has to be a specific way or come from specific people with specific ideas in order to be interesting or good (i.e. people who are really into watching Anthony Fantano videos or reading /r/hiphopheads). There is an argument that people like to make—and it is not a particularly good one, I should add—that if you like a certain thing, it's only because you don't know about other, better things. It's self-serving, and privileges knowledge (namely, the knowledge of whoever is making the argument) over personal preference, and I hate it, but I'm still about to make it, because I genuinely believe that people who like Death Grips do not realize that the type of hip-hop Death Grips make is present across the spectrum of hip-hop: noise-driven, scream-heavy, sonically progressive, philosophical and political in turn. Here are a few artists/albums that stack up to Death Grips both sonically and philosophically: Run the Jewels, B L A C K I E, Alley Boy, Trouble, Saul Williams' The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust!, Kanye West's Yeezus, Public Enemy, N.W.A., T.I.'s Trap Muzik, Young Jeezy's Let's Get It (Thug Motivation 101), Waka Flocka's Flockaveli, Clipping, OG Maco, The Devil, dead prez, Das Racist/Heems' solo projects, this Joell Ortiz song, and Danny Brown.

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So perhaps, Death Grips are not as unique as those who champion them might claim.

Joe: Yeah, ok dude. Death Grips' music can sound like pure noise at points, but I think when introverted and paranoid outsider types like MC Ride and Zach Hill sit down to discuss what kind of music they want to make, they don’t start with teasing chord progressions finished off with a nice cadence. So, pleasing little pop ditties like MIA’s “Bad Girls” just wouldn’t be possible. I strongly disagree that they lack sonic appeal. Like lots of noise acts before them, Death Grips preference for melody chaos reflects their fascination with futurism (Marinetti, Russolo et al). Their sound—at its best—is a celebration of speed, youth, violence, machines, and industry all banging on the skull of the manic and paranoid self—and that can’t always be captured in a tuneful way. Anyway, why do we use hyper-tuneful chord progressions? They are there to lead your ear, make things easier, familiar and satisfying. I don’t think Death Grips ever really wanted you to feel satisfied by a record. More enraged, and nobody is ever satisfiably enraged. Each track imprisons an emotion or concept, and rips it open with thumps, pulses, scrapes, screams, and bangs. For that reason, I have so much time for Death Grips, because invoking feelings through this type of noise—rather than conventional musical practices—is a much more difficult task.

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As for their genuine grasp of the topics they distill, Death Grips definitely don’t have the answers—they make mistakes, they are naive and often quite lost—they are their own flawed subjects, but at the same time it is that terrier-like questioning of everything that keeps me coming back. I think one of the most appealing dualities in their art is that they angrily tug at the coat tails of complex ideas, whilst making music that suggests not everything has to make sense.

That major label period you mention, when they signed with Epic Records, was tricky. They signed a deal in the faith that it would enable them to realise their artistic vision and do things even bigger and better than before. However, the team that signed them were sacked within twelve months of them arriving, and any Epic Records affinity for the Death Grips sound deteriorated. At the beginning of that period, you have the hope and optimism of The Money Store, still an abrasive record, but probably their most accessible ever. For the first time, they were trying to please people—new label, new fans, new beginnings—and it resulted in their most positively reviewed album. Then things fell apart, and No Love Deep Web was made during the collapse of this glass house. From the interviews, I’m quite convinced that both Zach and MC Ride went genuinely insane during the making of that record. They spent their entire advances on staying for two months at the Chateau Marmont, in a bid to become more like the celebrity hand-shaking, major label types they were being ignored by. I think this context makes both albums a very interesting listen.

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I love a lot of the acts you’ve listed, but Clipping and B L A C K I E are the only two I could listen to after a Death Grips record. The idea that they are a hip-hop group sometimes sits uncomfortably with me to be honest. The bare bones of their instrumentals are definitely inspired by rap beat structures, and MC Ride raps on a few songs, like “Get Got” and “No Love”, but on most he’s either screaming, yelling or talking, and their live experience feels way more like a punk gig than a rap show. Most pertinently, my head definitely doesn’t want to hear hip-hop after I listen to Death Grips. I want Minor Threat, Black Flag, early NIN, Ben Frost, Swans or more recently: Dreamcrusher. Telling me to listen to Das Racist after Death Grips is like bringing flowers to a gunfight. And telling me to listen to Yeezus, is like replacing those guns with floppy foam fingers.

From some of your points, I feel like the crux of your distaste for them might lie more in the smaller minority of snooty, forum-dwellers that are often most vocal about Death Grips, championing them with “game-changing” hyperbolic and soured airs of superiority; and hide behind the notion of a Death Grips album being complex so that they become intellectual by association. That is true, and it sucks. But, that happens with so much shit. Will you listen to The Money Store one more time for me?

Drew: Hey Joe! So I’m listening to The Money Store again, and I still just can’t muster up the wherewithal to give a shit about this. I don’t hate it, I don’t love it, I just do not care. I think, ultimately, that Death Grips are an extremely divisive band. They want to provoke extreme reactions. So in a way, my indifference towards them is a form of radical apathy. Or something.

My final thoughts on this whole back and forth are as follows: I don’t think Death Grips are terrible. I think if you’re already a fan of, like, Public Enemy, dark techno, industrial, and harsh noise, you’re probably going to like Death Grips a lot. And you have every reason to! They make music that is a pretty good synthesis of those styles, so hey, they do their job. They are definitely annoying in the way they act in public, but stuff like “they act annoying in public” is generally just stuff that people conveniently use as rhetorical ammunition against a band they don’t like but can’t put a finger on why. In closing, Death Grips is fine, it’s really a matter of whether or not you drink the Kool-Aid.

Joe and Drew don't just fight in articles, they fight on Twitter too. You can follow Joe at @Cide_Benengeli and Drew at @drewmillard.