Content Warnings:  Murdering Sex Workers Taken as an Artistic Abstraction When it’s a Real Thing that Happens and its Victims Do Not Deserve That, Apologies, I Just Felt Compelled to Kinda Sorta Go There While Reviewing This Particular Band.

So there’s this band called Death Grips that provokes strong feelings among the youngsters what know about ’em.  Maybe they’re problematic, maybe their fans are creeps?  Hard to tell at a glance and I don’t feel like digging into all that.  But they are very compelling, and I’m going to try to write about them here.  This will be challenging because they are quite weird.  Not the weirdest thing going these days, but certainly like nothing you will hear on the radio.

The instrumentation is spare but loud, something like punk rock but much more electronic, some hip hop influence, more of glitch.  It often pushes right up to the edge of not feeling like music at all, but doesn’t go all the way there like noise artists do.  Now there are a lot of different ways you could write music that would fill all the descriptors I just threw at the wall, so maybe I’ve failed.  Take two.

I’m going to resort to mysticism a lil bit.  Music has different components like rhythm, tempo, melody, whatever, and I don’t know enough to speak about them.  There’s another component I’m going to call soul.  Soul music has the kind of soul you’d first imagine when you hear the word – big feelings, beautifully expressed.  But it’s possible to have other kinds of souls, like it’s possible to have different melodies, tones, times.  You could have an angry soul, a blue soul, a glossy corporate soul that approaches zero soul at all.

These guys have a similar kind of soul to Einstürzende Neubaten.  An industrial soul?  They are expressing a feeling that is loud, powerful, and terrible in the classical sense, like the constructive and destructive energy of industrial machinery.  There’s no love here, just some human and/or post-human animal engaged with the tensions between terror and despair, between obsession and indifference – the feelings of being here, now.

Then there’s the vocals.  MC Ride is an unusual rapper in that he has ducked the hustle.  Surely he pays for that economically.  What kind of day job is he working?  I remember one of the rappers from The Coup leaned into his union work, like, as a longshoreman?  The DJ from that band ran a catering company before she passed away untimely.  I didn’t know this before but my fave musicians were never successful enough to opt out of having day jobs.  Maybe at peak they could stop just long enough to tour in the summer, and now, not at all.  Royalties shmoyalties, they’re working on 401ks and such.  What mailroom does MC Ride work in?  What barber shop?  What UPS warehouse?  DOES HE HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE?

It’s my inner cop / surveillance state enthusiast by way of the part of me who would stalk a celebrity.  But this guy does rap about murdering women, so who’s to say the secrecy isn’t giving cover to a life of horrific misdeeds?  Probably a contractor so he can travel around and nobody thinks twice about him having a secure basement full of strange tools.

I keed, I keed.  It’s just that rappers right now are all influencers.  Remember when the advice for aspiring writers and journalists was that every last one of them needed to be on twitter?  The rappers stayed doing that, plus insta and yt and all the rest.  Somehow, this guy cut some albums and acquired attention without doing anything but his art.  And what an art it is!

MC Ride has songs where every single lyric is yelled or barked.  It’s gotta be exhausting.  He’s doing what rappers call “getting ill,” so it’s natural to compare him to other rappers who have done the same.  The illest of all time, Old Dirty Bastard, also had songs where he bellowed or shouted the lyrics.  But ODB also sang, like a chemically enhanced karaoke drunk from hell.  Ride isn’t doing anything that cool, but still, he’s pretty awesome to behold.  Lyrically he’s more horrorcore, like Gravediggaz or the Geto Boys.  Hence the lady murdering.

But aside from his understandable desire for privacy provoking unreasonable suspicion, why do I find myself interrogating this horror rapper?  Hell, Bushwick Bill from the Geto Boys had a domestic violence situation involving a gun while he was high on angel dust.  Why does this quiet guy from California have me wondering?

Murdering ladies is far from the only thing he raps about, and within the songs where it’s mentioned, it often seems like a bit of edgelordry tossed-off to meet a rhyme scheme.  Most of his lyrics are about something else.  Famously they have a track that opens with a rant by Charles Manson, and Ride is rapping about some fire wizard shit, culminating on the verse with “I am the beast I worship.”  The video is intentionally hard to look at, but for a brief moment shows the first person view of someone pissing into a nasty toilet.  We see repeated imagery of Ride looking like a mentally ill homeless guy trying to die in the desert.  The grandiosity of this beast doesn’t come from gold, but from the bene gesserit litany – he looks on that which people fear and turns that into power.

That’s my impression.  I couldn’t tell you what’s actually going on in his mind, but it’s provocative and evocative.  I’m interested, and I’m years too late.  Last word is the band is down to just the two white boys, and as much as they are important musicians, I just don’t see myself listening to them without MC Ride.  He was their next door neighbor when he got recruited.  What are the odds?  Now he’s wherever and doing whatever, most likely not murdering prostitutes.  I hope he’s having a very nice time.

Interestingly, Death Grips (among other artists, including Kendrick Lamar) were cited as an influence on David Bowie’s critically acclaimed final album.  Bowie put that thing together while battling cancer.  Now he knows something that MC Ride doesn’t know yet.  Wizards gotta stay learning, right to the end.

Oh yeah, I asked a question there and I didn’t answer it.  Why do I find myself wondering if MC Ride has killed somebody?  If I look closely at the feeling, no, I don’t really believe that.  But there’s something in his style that feels like a deadly nightmare.  Like ESNB were the first part of the night, somehow sleeping through metal grinding and the death cries of animals, and MC Ride is when you start to wake up from that.  The dream has become a reality and all you can do is live through it.  He has a line like “I fucked the music, I made it cum, I fucked the music with my serpent tongue.”  There is nothing in this sexuality but death.

And if MC Ride is truly done with Death Grips, I’d say Death Grips is dead now too.

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Jeezis, my husband reminds me that I found out about Death Grips because he was trying to explain a meme to me that featured a screenshot from one of their videos.  That makes this yet another Brainjackin’ post.  Suffice it to say I wouldn’t know anything interesting in human history without my husband telling me about it first.  “Madness” here refers to a status effect in the game Elden Ring.