By João Ruy Faustino
Reviewed:
Exmilitary (Death Grips, 2011)
Money Store (Death Grips, 2012)
No Love Deep Web (Death Grips, 2012)
Government Plates (Death Grips, 2013)
The Powers That B (Death Grips, 2015)
Bottomless Pit (Death Grips, 2016)
Interview (Death Grips, 2016)
Year Of The Snitch (Death Grips, 2018)
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Friederich Nietzsche, 1886)
Fanged Noumena (Nick Land, 2011)
So long since we fell
Still don’t know we failed
– MC Ride, in The Fear
Humanity recedes like a loathsome dream.
– Nick Land, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-20071
Our Culture is an increasingly retroactive phenomenon, a territory that is being run down by successive appeals to nostalgia. This occurrence brings, above all, confusion over what authentically belongs to The Present, and damming disinterest over what belongs to The Future.
Listening to Death Grips is undoubtedly an experience that belongs to The Present. What remains most impressive about the band is that it’s so clear that the output of the musical group is contemporary. One can find a truly mystical reverberance with our times. Even if the public does not know, and even if many work hard for the public to never know, the mass is still sensible and intercepts. There is no point in explaining: you know it when you see it.
Industrial Hip Hop appears to be a category given in a hurry, as if the catalogist wasn’t at all sure on how to classify the music. It is at least a slightly curious denomination as the group is based on the great American ‘Rust Belt’ of… Los Angeles (not to mention the fact that the whole industrial music movement converged in an era of deindustrialisation). Despite this, the genre name is highly descriptive – it marks a clear demarcation between Death Grips and any futuristic-accelerationist-techno ideology. Death Grips is industrial, yet it still speaks to our world moved by technology and stumbles on Landian themes. Industrial is a term that conveys bruteness and modernity simultaneously. It represents the future of the past, or perhaps a past with a future.
When MC Ride says in an interview that he is no longer inspired by “human achievement” it hits us a thousand times more than if it had been said by an artist captivated by techno-optimism. Artists such as Grimes are too literal, I Wanna Be Software and all that, not to mention naive. Techno suffers from the same problem, and as Aphex Twin declared it is an art devoid of meaning. Stuff like Blackhaine is too local and involved in the underworld to have any kind of mass appeal. In the dominion of the Now there seems to be no comparable challenger. The body of people who resonate with Death Grips is thus extensive, mostly united and congregated by the vibe the group brings. Describing – or even worse, explaining – an aura is heresy for anyone involved in the cult. The belief is that one feels what one feels. The deep misconception in this principle is that palpitations are somehow a merely personal and private phenomenon when in fact the opposite is true. The fervour is a product and manifestation of mass culture. Fervour is the epitome of a communal event.
Step into the dark
An important aspect required to comprehend present times is that structures surrounding us are indeed not collapsing. Instead, they are melting, before our very eyes. Our current condition is reminiscent of a story that Oscar Wilde used to tell which described a manager of a theatre who said to the audience “A fire has broken out, please don’t panic, stay where you are” and then everybody burned to death.
How the trip never stops
On and on, it’s beyond insane
Why I set myself up
In a raging sea of flames?
You’re fit to learn the proper meaning of a beatdown
Madness, chaos in the brain
…
– MC Ride, in No Love
Our great problem seems to be that our institutions are not collapsing on us. We are burning inside them, faithfully listening to the manager and making ourselves numb to the blaze. Our own illusions prevent us from letting “the dead bury their dead”2 or from even asking what is living and what is dead. We seem trapped in a chain of non-events – contradictory shifts that falter and eventually dissipate.
Yeah we came to blow your system (blow)
You know what I’m sayin’? Kill it or die
Braggin’ about how you had it all dialled
– MC Ride, in System Blower
There is a definite lament for the fact that this century began with the promise of the end of History, a new age of continuous Progress. It’s as if we forgot the most basic laws. There are lies that last longer than others, and the ones that were once untraceable have become exhausted, they no longer have a future.
Our current vision of the future is so terrifying. Even in the midst of an order in a state of irreversible decline there is trouble admitting the most evident realities. Some things persist only to haunt us. We blame the System Blower. We are scared by it. We point to the wrath of populism as we face the demise of institutions. What no one ever fathoms is that populism only emerged because of the deterioration of the structures surrounding us. We feel helpless as History progresses and we see that there is nothing left to protect us, that there is no refuge in ruins. Meanwhile some plan to attack. They don’t mince their words, they say what they’re going to do in broad daylight. We ignore them, what have we ever done to them?
‘Cause I’m bustin’ for no reason
At random murder, killing season
But no one heard me, cold blood creepin’
Full tilt swervin’ through your bleedin’
System burnin’ to its knees and beggin’ for mercy
– MC Ride, in System Blower
In Guillotine we are reminded of the barbaric origins of this Age of Light. We are reminded that even our world was founded in brutality, that no barriers can seemingly prevent it. The end of peace seems near and even though we have blinders we can still sense that a nightmarish force is coming at us. Something will tear apart the world that we know. It has become impossible to ignore the fear anymore:
‘we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear!’ One day – everywhere in Europe the will and way to that day is now called ‘progress’.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
We are aware of our present weaknesses, and we are simultaneously knowledgeable of our eternal strengths, what we will be remembered for. Our liberty will one day be envied… let’s rejoice in it then. Let’s do what we can only do here. Let’s indulge ourselves in the most lost of deeds. For now sounds can reach any frequency, and all words can be uttered.
Discard directly after use
Forensics on that wild goose
Follow my footprints into loops
Cause I’m too high, too high
Cause I’m too high, too high
Feel like I’m never ever gonna come down
Scale richter punk weight of dis sound
– MC Ride, in Punk Weight
Drip freak freak seek seek so cold today
Black, black paint
Making sounds that don’t deserve us like blou
Black, black paint
Those are my Satanic urges right now
– MC Ride, in Black Paint
Fuck who’s watching
– MC Ride, in Whatever I Want (Fuck Who’s Watching)
These lyrics do not come isolated, they are compounded with turbulence that often pushes our ears to the limit. There’s not even time to listen: there are too many layers, those layers are too loud, those loud layers have too much interference. Yet we intercept and cannot let go. A strange process then follows:
Sublime pleasure is an experience of the impossibility of experience, an intuition of that part of the self that exceeds intuition by means of an immolating failure of intuition. The sublime is only touched upon as a pathological disaster.
– Nick Land, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
Populistic Fervour
Tracks such as System Blower and Hustle Bones are the soundtrack of our populist age. They exude pathos and disturbance, concepts that speak so much to us. They speak for the contradiction of seeing ourselves as the victims and the perpetrators simultaneously. Because there is simply no time, our drive is insatiable. Logic is abandoned, magic is invoked. We all live under The Powers That B and share the same confusion:
I can’t know what I’m ‘bout to do
I can’t know what I’m ‘bout to do
I’m what the fuck happens
And I can’t know what I’m ‘bout to do
– MC Ride, in The Powers That B
The only question that lingers while listening is if the man chanting at us is doing it from a pedestal or from the surface. MC Ride’s admissions do not strike the listener as any other rappers’: personal anecdotes, pleas, shrieks of violence… The vocalist’s private sentiments, his pathologies, are turned into ours in an unmistakably populistic fashion. What we hear are not mere apocryphal stories of someone – it is stated unequivocally “I’m what the fuck happens.” Our problems have become someone else’s problems – skilled orators and great figures have the ability to transmit to the masses their deepest and darkest fears. No story is self-contained, each thing and everything reveals something.
Of course, I indulge myself, in innumerable ways. ‘I’ tell myself the personal pronoun fails to mark the pseudo-neutral position of a commentator this time. That is rather a protraction of ‘Bataille’s’ incessant je into a further episode of debasement. For it is remarkable how degraded a discourse can become when it is marked by the obsessive reiteration of the abstract ego, mixing arrogance with pallid humility. The chronic whine that results—something akin to a degenerated reverberation from Dostoyevsky’s underground man—is the insistence of a humanity that has become an unbearable indignity. ‘I’ am (alone), as the tasteless exhibition of an endogenous torment, as the betrayal of communication, as a festering wound, in which the monadic knitting of the flesh loses itself in a mess of pus and scabs, etc. etc.…
– Nick Land, in The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism
‘The Thirst for Annihilation’
Black Dice begins with a “Kill me now.” In Bitch Please MC Ride bellows “Shut it down.” The verses in Fuck Me Out spell “Fuck it all/I’m going down.” In You Might Think He Loves You for Your Money but I Know What He Really Loves You for It’s Your Brand New Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat: “Hysterics scream help/Don’t worry, in a few you’ll all be somewhere else/Prepare yourselves, freelance motherfucker/Get so fuckin’ dark in here.” In I Break Mirrors With My Face In The United States: “We sniff and clutch each other’s fate/I don’t care about real life, I don’t care about real life.”
It’s all suicide, it’s all suicide, it’s all suicide
It’s all suicide, it’s all suicide, it’s all suicide
World of dogs
Ruthless and free
It’s all suicide to me
– MC Ride, in World of Dogs
The ‘appetite for destruction’3 is a motif impossible not to perceive in Death Grips’ work. Of course – how could one go on living like this, knowing that it is unsustainable? As long as we are “ruthless and free” the reverence for the abyss will persist. When we are lost, the way down seems to be the only way available. The sublime feeling of fascination for The End – usually by nuclear armageddon – is the epithet of the modern instinct. We don’t believe in the afterlife, we don’t believe in heaven: only in hell.
Darkness from the zone
Mastered and pushed far beyond
Eons beyond the line never crossed
By them punks livin’ soft while I ride that bomb
Dr. Strangelove
Into the sun
Look no hands megatons
Rode like man we can’t lose
– MC Ride, in Hustle Bones
Our current dazed connection with the doomsday clock seems to be more often interrupted by our wish for both hands to reach midnight than the sense of terror that used to consume us. We feel oversaturated. There is no apparent ‘will’ left to rebuild what has been broken.
Cioran quotes Lao Tsu's maxim 'the intense life is contrary to the Tao', and compares the tranquillity of the modest life with the thirst for annihilating ecstasy that has possessed the Western world. However, acknowledging the compulsion of his Occidental heritage, he remarks “I can pay homage to Lao Tsu a thousand times, but I am more likely to identify with an assassin.” Our culture, he argues, is essentially fanatical.
– Nick Land, in Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007
Going ‘Back to Basics’ is not an alternative. We got out of there for some reason. What we have to remind ourselves is that there is nothing trapping us. Infinitely more powerful than the outside forces hindering us are the impulses that live within ourselves.
Morality as a posture – goes against our taste today. This too is progress: just as it was progress when religion as a posture finally went against the taste of our fathers, …
– Friedrich Nietszche, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Despite all the horrible tragedies from the past we still managed to create a society based on dreams. What made our world a set for nightmares at the turn of this century was our own dormancy and resignedess… The stagnation was caused on purpose.
Remaining under artificial light, for many, seems no longer an option. This lamentable drift is, in the singular Landian expression, the Dark Enlightenment – the total embrace of mysticism and cyber-technology. One is never sure if Nick Land is fully aware of the consequences that his preachings may have. He is, at the same time, utterly conscious of the darkness and serene towards it. What lacks is the reason for going down such the abyss – there is no one pushing us – beyond just this drive.
And I know soon come my time
For in mine void a pale horse burns
But I fear not the time I'm taken
Past the point of no return
Wage war like no tomorrow
'Cause no hell there won't be one
For all who deny the struggle
The triumphant overcome
– MC Ride, in Beware
Notes from a news junkie
When a good life isn’t possible, a good death is the only option.
Insights on McLuhan
Comment on a mostly-forgotten book
Contemporary urban culture
in Delighted to Death
Karl Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte — Chapter 1
Nick Land, in The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism