Death Grips -- Hipster Music Collection

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Death Grips
Artist Website: thirdworlds.net

Exmilitary

I know that for some reason I’m supposed to like this because the blogosphere says I should. Like a drunken homeless man screaming over a skipping MIA CD, I’m not sure what the appeal is here besides something for suburban white kids to get angry at. We did the rap metal thing in the 90s, didn’t we? And didn’t it turn into a complete fucking joke? Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit or anything, but has that agro thing that those bands were going after. Sonically it's more like someone getting ahold of Dizzee Rascal and asking him to amp up the screams and then putting a 5th grader on an 808 and letting him hit some buttons. Songs are not really present anywhere here. It’s more like a bunch of crap being flung at the wall by a retarded monkey on Red Bull after going through military training with a Central American junta. The idea here is obviously to assault the senses in every way possible, but rather than assault, it really just insults. How or why anyone would ever want to listen to this album more than once is beyond me. Granted, I was never a hardcore fan either, so electronic noise and bad rap-yelling somehow holds even less appeal to me. Maybe I’m just a stick in the mud, but this feels like an experiment gone horribly awry. The song “Blood Creepin” with its “ooooh waaa ooohh waaa” shit is enough to make any normal human being want to leap from somewhere very high. But, after all, maybe that’s the point?

The Money Store

When I heard LA Reid had signed Death Grips to Epic, I was understandably confused. It would be like Disneyland creating a Mapplethorpe attraction. Or Nickelodeon doing a show about a young John Wayne Gacy. It just seemed like an odd marriage -- odder than odd. After all, Reid is known more as a diva maker, not the guy who signs atonal, experimental punk rap acts. I'm not certain how he felt when they titled the album "The Money Store," an obvious nod and wink to the fact they signed with a major in order to fund their project and nothing else. The album itself often makes me feel like the guy staring at the all-red canvas at the MoMA, wondering why it's hanging on the wall at all. You'd think, the way all the music media creamed themselves over this album, that it was the second coming of something. The things though is that something isn't quite clear. Shit, I jumped on the 24-7 Spyz bandwagon in the late eighties, and look at where that got us. Call it what you will: punk/funk, rap/metal, junglejuice. Whatever. So the question becomes, who is this for? Besides Zach Hill, I mean. All signs, based on the genre, the age of the folks in the band and their history, point to their target audience as me. Aging hipster music fans fed up with the current crop of hip-hop artists, tired of the bleep and bloop of today's indie music, and wishing (though not necessarily) for the Rage Against the Machine for a new time and world. Or a new Black Flag or Dead Kennedys, to go back further. Is this band any of those? No, not really. Its message, if there is one, is too buried in its art for art's sake to make an impact beyond the novelty of the thing and sheer namecheck value. Though their association with LA has pretty much made that a non-starter. Money store, indeed.