PCP and Late Capitalism: The Death Grips Demolition Machine (Modernism and Pop Music 2)

OUT OF THE SHADOWS BARRAGE OF WITCH TONGUE COBRA SPIT OVER APOCALYPTIC CULT KILLER CAULDRON SMOKE STOMP MUSIC SERIOUSLY YAH
- Death Grips, "Guillotine"

This is the second of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.  You can read my first post on The Weeknd here.

It's hard for me to be anything other than intensely enthusiastic about Death Grips. I mentioned them in the first post on this blog as part of pop avant-garde that is attempting to push the nihilistic elements in pop music as far as possible.  They manage this by combining hip-hop and noise into a lean, hard, and nasty statement:



Death Grips takes the masculine, violent posturing of hip-hop and pushes it to the point where it nears unintelligible noise, no longer easily gendered or understood. They have a real affinity with the subject of my last post, The Weeknd.  Where the Weeknd (at his best) takes the sex and drugs out of hip-hop and distills them into a hedonistic final statement, Death Grips takes the violence out of hip-hop and uses it to brew up a clanking mess.  At times we'll recognize a sentiment or a turn of phrase from mainstream music, but it is contextualized by a frantic psychosis.  We've seen this sort of move before, the most eminent examples being Scarface's work ("Mind Playing Tricks On Me") and Gravediggaz' "horrorcore" efforts.  Death Grips even has a musical relative in early Insane Clown Posse.  While the juggalos take the violence of hip-hop to the point of cartoonishness, Death Grips takes it beyond serious.  And it's easier to take Death Grips at their word than, say, the frustrated kids in Odd Future.

 In an interview earlier this year with Pitchfork, Zach Hill (the Hella-alum drummer behind the project) talked about extensively about the band's inspiration. He talks extensively about having conversations with other, unseen forces that pervade our day-to-day life. This sort of New Age spiritualism typically has an ineffective monist sheen to it, but coming from Death Grips it takes on a sort of terrifying, Lovecraftian hue. In this aspect of their image, Death Grips is participating in a movement in 21st century culture that includes Erowid and Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void. This line of thinking takes a cue from Castaneda rather than from Patrick Bateman or  the hippie movement; it has moved beyond the holistic humanism and pragmatic hedonism of 20th century experiences to the nihilist experiments of drugs like DMT.  

It is, in some ways, all too appropriate that the members of Death Grips stayed in the iconic Chateau Marmont while recording their major label record, since they inhabit and express the structural underside of violence that allows the cultural superstructure of Hollywood to emerge.  In a world where Billboard feeds us partial and incomplete cultural narratives about how life is, Death Grips attempts to show us the cultural conflict at the point of application.  The warm fuzz of late capitalist pop music is presented here with a sense of real perspective: half-quotes twisted in a conflicted mess of noise.  And through the clamor, the human voice that can be heard is alienated and furious.

Insofar as they have a positive political agenda, it comes through in songs like Klink.



Here, Death Grips has taken the political concerns of hip-hop and, in the footsteps of Dead Prez and Public Enemy, push the message out to the political fringe.  Picking up the banner from the violent anti-police rhetoric in classics like Fuck tha Police, Death Grips uncovers the political undertones of this sort of anti-authoritarian violence with lines like "Six feet deep beneath the streets so they can't never say shit again/Fuck the man with a thick broomstick and put a black flag on the end". Here again, there is no pretense of a macro-political agenda. Insofar as Death Grips has a political stance, it is a strictly tactical one; they are concerned with political conflicts, not with political narratives. They have a profound interest in the "Deep Web", a supposedly uncensored and unpoliceable network that, alongside other groups like The Pirate Bay, Wikileaks, and Anonymous, is part of the rising constellation of tactical anti-authoritarianism on the web.  In this light, it is unsurprising that the band has been dropped by Epic Records after leaking their own album.

For all of their hallucinatory imagery, Death Grips has their bloodshot eyes locked on the brutality of the modern situation. I can't resist leaving you with a few words from the perpetrators:

End of the Weeknd: Experiment at the Limits of Hedonism (Modernism and Pop Music 1)

WELCOME TO THE OTHER SIDE
YOU'RE LOST
BABY STEP OUTSIDE YOUR MIND
- Life of the Party, The Weeknd

This is first of a series of articles I'm planning on writing about pop music and modernism.

Art is not the first concern of pop music.  That said, what is artistic in pop music is the articulation of a certain way of being.  This may sound heady, but I mean that no matter its puerility, pop music expresses a certain set of experiences and a perspective on those experiences. It may simply express bald melodrama (teenage angst) or bland escapism (nonstop parties); the perspective taken may be reductive and irresponsible, but still, a life and a mood are conveyed. Much of the music on Billboard expresses something familiar to our own lives (with either this or that accented) or something familiar to our collective fantasy life (money, sex, success).  For Abel Tesfaye, The Weeknd, pop music is not an expression of the familiar, but an opportunity for exploration of a set of our cultural limits.

I wrote about Drake and Young Money last year on this blog. I said that Drake (and 40) brought a wistfulness and haunting sense of loss to the now-banal "rapper lifestyle".  In their music, there is a sense of trying to stay grounded while at the same time enjoying one's success.  It is this tension that makes Drake more interesting and complex than say, his comrade Wayne (though both Wayne and Nicki Minaj have attempted forays into this mood, I find their attempts token and fairly adolescent).  Though both the Weeknd and Drake occupy a part of the same OVOXO clique and occupy parts of a constellation of similar artists (also including the oddball Kendrick Lamar and the young romantic Frank Ocean) The Weeknd takes his music beyond the relatable themes of regret and loneliness.  While his neighboring artists have developed chilly mutant strains of their R&B and left-field hip-hop genetics, Tesfaye has attempted to breed a predator.

A consideration of the music itself.  In many of his songs, Tesfaye is directly addressing a young woman.  Often confused, uncomfortable, displaced, depressed, or vulnerable, these girls are wandering the party circuit where Tesfaye makes his home.  He seduces them into drugs, sex, or other hinted depravities.  This formula can create the disturbing sensation that one is listening to an act of predation, as in the truly disconcerting "Initiation".  With its murky lyrical references to coercive group sex and hard drugs, and a musical backdrop including a distorted, alien bass thump, echoed guitar, and Tesfaye's inhuman voice, it makes a distinctly sinister impression:



The braggadacio of someone like Trey Songz is here unconstrained by the need to be MTV marketable. Where artists like Flo Rida or the Black Eyed Peas attempt an Epicurean mood (it's the weekend!), the lifestyle that Tesfaye introduces us to is wholly unsustainable.  He makes no pretensions to the faith or social duress that define the other side of gangster masculinity.   Tesfaye's music is excessive and makes no apologies.



This makes Tesfaye's music fairly one dimensional.  At times he allows suggestions of woe or regret to creep into his lyrics, but they ring hollow.  Any attempt to portray him as a "dynamic" personality is missing the interesting aspect of his music. As gestured at above, The Weeknd is a profoundly Modern reflection on our cultural fantasies.  Listening to one of his mixtapes is a long look into our musical id.

Despite its flatness, the project has a special nuance; it is compelling because it doesn't rely on shock for its transgression (compare and contrast with the adolescent fuck-you attitude of early Eminem).  Tesfaye takes pop narratives and soundscapes that we are by now familiar with (club life, R&B seduction, casual intoxication) a long way towards their logical conclusion without stepping into caricature.

The twist of The Weeknd is that in Tesfaye's world the "avant-garde" spirit is pop. He may not approach the explorations of someone like de Sade, but a version of the libertine spirit is present in his music, asking the same chain of questions that it has for centuries.  With the excesses of art today, have we exhausted its potential?  What does it mean to "transgress" in today's pop culture?  In a world without God, is morality an aesthetic phenomenon?  These questions are important to the Modern cultural conversation, and The Weeknd articulates them in a contemporary popular context where they are becoming increasingly insistent.