with the ninth pick in the ninth round of the 2013 Desert Island Music Draft, i select...
Death Grips - The Money Store (04/21/12):
clickable link: album art NSFW
01 Get Got
02 The Fever (Aye Aye)
03 Lost Boys
04 Blackjack
05 Hustle Bones
06 I've Seen Footage
07 Double Helix
08 System Blower
09 The Cage
10 Punk Weight
11 F*** That
12 B**** Please
13 Hacker
Genre: experimental hip hop, noise rap, hardcore punk
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Money_Store_(album)
note: this album is tremendously important to me as a Sacramento-area native, and the lengthy description/review below represents a significant portion of my journey as a writer, as an amateur reviewer of music, and as a lover of music. this might be a hollow request, but i am going to please ask VF21 and her fellow moderators to refrain from removing the names of a few of the artists mentioned below, despite the fact that they have not yet appeared in this draft. i deem their mention necessary in the way that i want to contextualize this album, so that the listener might appreciate its importance (to me and to hip hop, in general), even if one cannot appreciate the music itself (which can be difficult upon first listen, though i've linked to a relatively accessible song above as a starting point). anyway, onward and upward...
a great many of you are considerably older than i am, and that is not meant to be perceived as a demographic slight or a dig at what one's age says about one's picks in this draft. it is a note of reverence, to be among those who can appreciate the kind of moment i'm about to describe. that said, a great many of you have been around long enough to experience the coming of "the new," when something fascinating, compelling, and altogether confounding remaps the lived experience of your brain. we are rhythmic creatures, and music, perhaps more than any other art form, manages to universally awaken and unite something in all of us. and, from within the art form of music, there are cataclysmic events that very rarely occur, like the way Chuck Berry's guitar gave way to rock & roll, or the way Grandmaster Flash's funky cadence gave way to rap. if you were around for either of those events, you can certainly comprehend at an experiential level what i can only appreciate at a historical level: that things were changing. then there are lesser, but still massive shifts from within the call-and-response of culture, like Sex Pistols' response to 70's disco and yacht rock giving way to punk, or Kurt Cobain's response to 80's hair metal giving way to grunge...
Death Grips hail from Sacramento, CA, and while the Deftones have been and always will be my hometown heroes, i am proud to place Death Grips second on that list right below them. they are the sound of "the new," and are, in my opinion, The Shape of Rap to Come. i found out about the project via Zach Hill's Twitter account. for the uninitiated, Hill is a bit of a legend in the Sacramento music scene. he's an intensely mathematical drummer, accomplishing technical feats of wizardry for bands like Hella, Crime in Choir, Marnie Stern, and even Deftones' vocalist Chino Moreno's side project Team Sleep. Hill tweeted that he was drumming for a new hip hop group called Death Grips, and they were giving their debut album away for free online, so i promptly downloaded it out of sheer morbid curiosity. when i first listened to that debut album, titled Exmilitary, i was rocked backward by the presence of purpose. i didn't know what i was hearing. i wasn't even sure that i liked it. i just knew that i'd never heard anything like it...
it was hip hop, but it wasn't. it felt thrashy like Bad Brains. it felt boom bap like El-P. there were bass-heavy moments that recalled Bomb Squad's famous late-80's/early-90's production on Public Enemy and Ice Cube records, and there was a downtempo, grinding kind of minimalism you might find in drone music. it was confrontational. it was noisy. it was stunning, and even though it rattled my brain (a difficult feat considering that i grew up on hardcore), i would return to this album repeatedly in 2011, each time peeling back layers in the music, in the lyrics, giddy like i'd struck gold. "I FOUND SOMETHING!!" it was the very first album that i couldn't wait to
write about, and it started me down a path as an aspiring amateur music journalist. Death Grips had remapped my brain. i was 24 years old at the time, and it felt like i was 13 again, at Dimple Records, discovering something
new. except this wasn't just new to me. i was convinced that this was new to
everyone...
i would play Exmilitary for anyone who'd listen. most of them hated it. i didn't care. and when Death Grips announced a follow-up, i was all-ears. to my suprise and delight, The Money Store was
even better than their debut, and for that reason i've picked it here. for those who care, i wrote a review for The Money Store last year upon its release, and an edited version of that review appears below:
On 2011 single "Death Grips (Next Grips)," MC Ride defiantly spits, "We bring this for the ones who fiend to see the truth taken back in pain / the weakness of this scene / who f***s / who lack the nuts to claim / the streets from which that real s*** comes to push you up on game / 'What's your name?' Check it, b****: IT'S DEATH GRIPS!!!!" This band truly seems birthed from something primordial, something that exists in our collective DNA, but also something keenly future-bent. Death Grips' 2011 debut album, Exmilitary (which does not feature the song above), was a revelation to my ears, an aural assault quite unlike anything I had ever heard. I grew up on hardcore. This was not hardcore. I was raised on hip hop. This was not hip hop. Whatever it was, the noise came courtesy of my own backyard. And I wanted more. Enter The Money Store, which arrived this April like a nuclear volley hurled straight from the pit of Sacramento, CA. To be plain: it was the sound of something
new.
Suffice it to say that Death Grips are the product of a place and time, their artistic aims motivated by social collapse and satisfied by specific technological conditions. "Get Got" sets the stage at street-level, pivoting on a synth loop that croaks like a smashed police siren, yet remains decidedly less abrasive than the listener may be expecting. "Get Got" is all jittery programmed drums and paranoia, and it finds MC Ride in uncharacteristically low-key form. But it's a bit of a red herring. Just after the two-minute mark, Ride briefly alters his intonation enough to signal The Money Store's intentions: "Drilled a hole into my head / pierced the bone and / felt the breeze / lift my thoughts out the sick bed / with a pair of crow skeleton wings." There is an almost-frightening self-awareness of deteriorating mental health here, and the album that follows will only widen the pilot hole that Ride is referring to above.
While "Get Got" freezes us in the light show of a police car, "The Fever (Aye Aye)" opens with a swell of synthesizer that fades in like an air horn. We're off the street now and in the industrial future that Death Grips' will build up and tear down around us. Fans of Zach Hill's other projects will be glad to hear his hyperactive kick pedal fluttering about like hummingbird wings. It's a clear album highlight, with a chorus that boasts a wicked synth line doing its best impression of Jimi Hendrix while Ride barks "I've got the fever!!" like Mark E. Smith in a chubby bunny competition. Burnett's delivery is so wonderfully unusual, as if he has too much to say and ends up choking on the words before they've exited his chest.
"Lost Boys" is Death Grips laying out a template for what minimal slowcore rap might sound like when run through a meat grinder. It is bass-heavy and neurotic, a paranoid view of hip hop on the other side of psychological disorder, or from the ledge of a high rise, as Burnett proclaims, "It's such a LONG. WAY. DOWN!!" Indeed it is. The Money Store is truly a product of its time. While a Death Grips' live performance is a blunt and visceral experience, the presentation of their art on record is much more worked-over, with MC Ride's flow—if, indeed, you could even describe Stefan Burnett's style of rapping as something that flows—obliterated by an onslaught of digitization, as if the Wizard of Oz had gone mad behind his curtain, twiddling knobs and pulling levers until Ride's projection is no longer recognizable as human. "Blackjack" is a case-in-point, it's bubbling magma pace set to a towering bassline and a weirdly-pitched synthesizer, with Burnett rapping incoherently about "how to rob men blind." Its gutterspeak for the future, the sound of our social fabric's hard drive crashing.
Later comes the album's centerpiece, "I've Seen Footage," a slice of "somethin' I ain't seen before," and my pick for Song of the Year. It's set in a "deep space ghetto," like some Bizarro World throwback to an unborn collaboration between Salt-n-Pepa and MC Hammer, dusted off and remixed by The Bomb Squad while smoking a dime bag they bought from Bad Brains. Yes, it really is that f***ing strange and thrilling, as MC Ride transcribes his paranoia across the kind of catchy where-the-ever-living-F***-did-that-come-from that Death Grips may never top: "I've seen footage, I stay 'noided, I've seen footage." It may not read like 2012's best hook, but I'll be damned if you're not hands-in-the-air when that chorus hits.
Elsewhere, "System Blower" absolutely curbstomps the listener. This track simply pummels with the force of a mortar shell, and the layman is left rattled and wondering what the hell is making all this noise? Synthesizer? Guitar pedal? Some indiscriminate computer program? I suppose it doesn't matter. Death Grips "came to blow your system" regardless. "Punk Weight" pitch shifts a vocal sample into the next life while Zach Hill pounds the skins behind an absolutely nasty filter, giving them a cavernous, automatic gunfire effect. Death Grips are a galaxy away from the trendy stateside dubstep of the moment, but they're also not shy about dropping the bass at just the right moment in a song like "Punk Weight." It's skullf***ingly confrontational, with MC Ride arriving like a lightning strike: "Hot s***, cold s*** / okay muthaf***a, let's do this!!" Goddammit if it's not the kind of affirmation independent music needs right now.
By the time final track "Hacker" rears its grooving, dancehall-ready head, the listener's hair is completely blown back. For the twelve tracks prior, Death Grips are intent on shattering teeth, but "Hacker" stands out as a quirky diversion and breathtaking climax, with a stream-of-consciousness meets topical-non-sequitur lyrical bent, bizarrely tackling everything from chicken-or-egg paradoxes to Michael Jordan brand shoes to Lady Gaga to Sammy Davis Jr. to Tesla to Wikileaks to Linens n Things. Yup, that's right: Linens n Things. Death Grips. And Linens n Things. Don't ask me, ask MC Ride, as he bellows the chorus: "I'm in your area / I'm in / your area!!" This is Death Grips at their most unusually joyful, at their most oddly Seinfeldian, reveling in their strangeness from within a pop cultural murk of excess, as Burnett declares, "The table's flipped, now we've got all the coconuts, b****!!" What does that even mean?! I haven't the slightest clue. There is no context for it. It's as if Burnett's making it up as he goes, like he might be able to redefine his grasp on the notion of "what's mine." Death Grips are projecting into the future, and we're welcome to come along for the [MC] ride while the hard drives crash all around us, with Stefan Burnett left pounding his chest: "Stay 'noided!!"
