Death Grips & Me

I found out about Death Grips on some list of ‘best new music of Two Thousand Whatever’ way back shortly after The Money Store came out.  Whoever wrote the article recommended the song Get Got, and described it as unlike anything else I’d ever heard.  That’s always an intriguing notion for me, and I pretty quickly listened to the song.  I did like it, and it surely did sound very different from anything else I’d heard before.  I’ve heard people describe Death Grips as the last relevant punk band by way of Hip Hop and I think that’s a fairly good way of describing them.  Though fans of punk and fans of hip hop could very easily not like them whatsoever.   

I never listened to hip hop basically at all until like 2003 and then started out with Outkast as well as weirder stuff like El-P and Cannibal Ox and then Wu-Tang Clan shortly thereafter.  I had a basis for hip hop upon getting into Death Grips, but even still they were definitely removed from some of the more melodic stuff I tended to listen to, and this is true even now.  I basically listen to pop music and really really weird stuff, and in some bizarre way they’re a combination of the two, although if I had to pick I’d include them in with the weird stuff.   

Sometimes I find myself in states of anxiety/anger/frustration, often during the WYP summer program, and then I crave specific kinds of music that can give voice to these feelings.  When I was in high school I would listen to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson.  Now I listen to  Death Grips.  

When I first got into them, I fell in love with their poppier songs and I couldn’t make sense of everything else they did at all.  I made a few attempts to get into them further over the years and failed.  Finally, about a year and a half ago, I was reading about them and started listening to a few of their songs I’d never heard before, and all of a sudden everything kinda clicked for me.  I fell in love in the blink of an eye.  Their sound design is very unique and seemingly effortless in a way that I’m sure was tremendously hard to achieve.  And then you have MC Ride who somehow functions as this non-stop hooks machine rage monster.  I still think he is a pretty crap lyricist, though.  Sometimes he happens upon a good line or two, and he is usually good at avoiding lyrics that are eye-rollingly, record-scratchingly bad, but he better never release a book of poetry.  I would argue that in many ways the lyrics aren’t important with him, though.  He’s gotta scream something, right?  

My wife hates them, though.  She doesn’t like angry or aggressive music, and that is basically all they are.  It’s like being married to someone with a horrible peanut allergy.  If you want a PB&J you better go eat it in the car by yourself.   But that’s okay.  I think a relationship where both people are huge Death Grips fans might be problematic.