Late to Death Grips

Content Warnings:  Murdering Sex Workers Taken as an Artistic Abstraction When it’s a Real Thing that Happens and its Victims Do Not Deserve That, Apologies, I Just Felt Compelled to Kinda Sorta Go There While Reviewing This Particular Band.

So there’s this band called Death Grips that provokes strong feelings among the youngsters what know about ’em.  Maybe they’re problematic, maybe their fans are creeps?  Hard to tell at a glance and I don’t feel like digging into all that.  But they are very compelling, and I’m going to try to write about them here.  This will be challenging because they are quite weird.  Not the weirdest thing going these days, but certainly like nothing you will hear on the radio.

The instrumentation is spare but loud, something like punk rock but much more electronic, some hip hop influence, more of glitch.  It often pushes right up to the edge of not feeling like music at all, but doesn’t go all the way there like noise artists do.  Now there are a lot of different ways you could write music that would fill all the descriptors I just threw at the wall, so maybe I’ve failed.  Take two.

I’m going to resort to mysticism a lil bit.  Music has different components like rhythm, tempo, melody, whatever, and I don’t know enough to speak about them.  There’s another component I’m going to call soul.  Soul music has the kind of soul you’d first imagine when you hear the word – big feelings, beautifully expressed.  But it’s possible to have other kinds of souls, like it’s possible to have different melodies, tones, times.  You could have an angry soul, a blue soul, a glossy corporate soul that approaches zero soul at all.

These guys have a similar kind of soul to Einstürzende Neubaten.  An industrial soul?  They are expressing a feeling that is loud, powerful, and terrible in the classical sense, like the constructive and destructive energy of industrial machinery.  There’s no love here, just some human and/or post-human animal engaged with the tensions between terror and despair, between obsession and indifference – the feelings of being here, now.

Then there’s the vocals.  MC Ride is an unusual rapper in that he has ducked the hustle.  Surely he pays for that economically.  What kind of day job is he working?  I remember one of the rappers from The Coup leaned into his union work, like, as a longshoreman?  The DJ from that band ran a catering company before she passed away untimely.  I didn’t know this before but my fave musicians were never successful enough to opt out of having day jobs.  Maybe at peak they could stop just long enough to tour in the summer, and now, not at all.  Royalties shmoyalties, they’re working on 401ks and such.  What mailroom does MC Ride work in?  What barber shop?  What UPS warehouse?  DOES HE HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE?

It’s my inner cop / surveillance state enthusiast by way of the part of me who would stalk a celebrity.  But this guy does rap about murdering women, so who’s to say the secrecy isn’t giving cover to a life of horrific misdeeds?  Probably a contractor so he can travel around and nobody thinks twice about him having a secure basement full of strange tools.

I keed, I keed.  It’s just that rappers right now are all influencers.  Remember when the advice for aspiring writers and journalists was that every last one of them needed to be on twitter?  The rappers stayed doing that, plus insta and yt and all the rest.  Somehow, this guy cut some albums and acquired attention without doing anything but his art.  And what an art it is!

MC Ride has songs where every single lyric is yelled or barked.  It’s gotta be exhausting.  He’s doing what rappers call “getting ill,” so it’s natural to compare him to other rappers who have done the same.  The illest of all time, Old Dirty Bastard, also had songs where he bellowed or shouted the lyrics.  But ODB also sang, like a chemically enhanced karaoke drunk from hell.  Ride isn’t doing anything that cool, but still, he’s pretty awesome to behold.  Lyrically he’s more horrorcore, like Gravediggaz or the Geto Boys.  Hence the lady murdering.

But aside from his understandable desire for privacy provoking unreasonable suspicion, why do I find myself interrogating this horror rapper?  Hell, Bushwick Bill from the Geto Boys had a domestic violence situation involving a gun while he was high on angel dust.  Why does this quiet guy from California have me wondering?

Murdering ladies is far from the only thing he raps about, and within the songs where it’s mentioned, it often seems like a bit of edgelordry tossed-off to meet a rhyme scheme.  Most of his lyrics are about something else.  Famously they have a track that opens with a rant by Charles Manson, and Ride is rapping about some fire wizard shit, culminating on the verse with “I am the beast I worship.”  The video is intentionally hard to look at, but for a brief moment shows the first person view of someone pissing into a nasty toilet.  We see repeated imagery of Ride looking like a mentally ill homeless guy trying to die in the desert.  The grandiosity of this beast doesn’t come from gold, but from the bene gesserit litany – he looks on that which people fear and turns that into power.

That’s my impression.  I couldn’t tell you what’s actually going on in his mind, but it’s provocative and evocative.  I’m interested, and I’m years too late.  Last word is the band is down to just the two white boys, and as much as they are important musicians, I just don’t see myself listening to them without MC Ride.  He was their next door neighbor when he got recruited.  What are the odds?  Now he’s wherever and doing whatever, most likely not murdering prostitutes.  I hope he’s having a very nice time.

Interestingly, Death Grips (among other artists, including Kendrick Lamar) were cited as an influence on David Bowie’s critically acclaimed final album.  Bowie put that thing together while battling cancer.  Now he knows something that MC Ride doesn’t know yet.  Wizards gotta stay learning, right to the end.

Oh yeah, I asked a question there and I didn’t answer it.  Why do I find myself wondering if MC Ride has killed somebody?  If I look closely at the feeling, no, I don’t really believe that.  But there’s something in his style that feels like a deadly nightmare.  Like ESNB were the first part of the night, somehow sleeping through metal grinding and the death cries of animals, and MC Ride is when you start to wake up from that.  The dream has become a reality and all you can do is live through it.  He has a line like “I fucked the music, I made it cum, I fucked the music with my serpent tongue.”  There is nothing in this sexuality but death.

And if MC Ride is truly done with Death Grips, I’d say Death Grips is dead now too.

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Jeezis, my husband reminds me that I found out about Death Grips because he was trying to explain a meme to me that featured a screenshot from one of their videos.  That makes this yet another Brainjackin’ post.  Suffice it to say I wouldn’t know anything interesting in human history without my husband telling me about it first.  “Madness” here refers to a status effect in the game Elden Ring.

Nadia Rose

UK rap lady Nadia Rose cross’d my recs on yt because apparently I like lady musicians too much, but I appreciate it.  She’s very talented and cute.  This video is several years old.  I don’t know if she was a teenager at the time, but she’s giving teen girl squad energy in a good way.

One annoying grain in the back of the mind whenever you’re confronted with a new artist from the UK is … are they terfy?  Is Terf Island.  Is this style descended from the Afro-Caribbean community, who are notoriously homophobic?  I remember enjoying Roots Manuva a lot until he said “away with the fairies” and I was like, oh, away with me.  Sigh.

So I’m not going to look it up and find out.  Meanwhile, she had to take some years off due to label bullshit, and she grew up and filled out.  Lookin nice, madamoiselle, and still rocking out…

Wotta doll.  So fun.  It’s in the mix now.

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I Hurt Yer Daddy, Sunshine

Medley in my mind this morning, sort of a downbeat for a low mood.  I’ve alluded to the existence of this particular horrible song before, but I mention it again – “Father’s Grave” by Glenn Danzig and Melissa auf der Mar – because it was the starting point.  I might have been thinking about sex-adjacent things and Danzig at the time, and that tune emerged from the shadows to punish me for it.

Song Two:  “Hurt,” the original Nine Inch Nails version.  Song Three:  “Age of Aquarius,” but just that “Let the Sun Shine In” part.

Anyone else music-accursed this Sunday?

Oh hey, happy Father’s Day!

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Mullets and Sexbombs and Prog Rock O My

Remember Alison Goldfrapp?  After coming to fame collabing with Tricky, she swung for the stars on her self-titled project, repping herself as a powerful sexbeast.  Just a force of supernature that could pull the world down to her level and make everybody want to fuck in an unreasonable way.

As it turned out, this was not sustainable.  She went sing-songy mellow fizz on subsequent albums.  Hey, energy is finite.

Well.  The archetype of Queen Sexbeast might be hard to maintain, but a different kind of energy came out of a distant colony, when Amyl and the Sniffers were born.  Amy Taylor has not dropped the bombast yet, even if there are a few mellow tracks laced in for a breather during long sets.  Good job, Amy.

But what’s up with that hairstyle?  She was only rocking it for a short time, but it’s more typically associated with lesbians these days.  Maybe Amy got tired of disappointing the nice ladies with her heterrible ways.

Call it a mange mullet.  Just taking the concept of a mullet, which used to be romantic and fierce to the mans what rocked it, and making it look like a mistake, like the result of problems and scissors.  Observe the mousier member of this amurrican band:

These are just some songs in my mix lately, and the hair jumped out at me.  And that reminded me of a song I haven’t heard in years, that I absolutely fucking love.  Did you know how many words for mullet there are?  Allow the Vandals to enumerate them.

I had a mullet for a minute when I was about thirteen (1989), because my dad wanted to “get the hair out of my eyes.”  I glared at him so hard when I came out of the barber that he never made me get a haircut again, and I had more uniformly long hair from then until I went bald at the age of twenty-two.

Just the same, I do love Queensrÿche.  Tempted to throw some Richard Marx on here to demo serious mullet action, but I can’t make myself do it.  Queensrÿche, on the other hand… bottoms up.

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We Lost Gost

Seven years ago this day I went to a concert, some cool newish bands my husband was into.  They impressed.  The opening act was a lady-fronted local death rock outfit who put on a fun show.  The headliner was a famous international playboy of darksynth, some kind of miniature frenchman.  Somewhere in between was his fellow genre titan, James Lollar, known professionally as Gost.  About one month ago, he died young from undisclosed causes.  His family’s fundraiser is still up and hasn’t reached its goal, if you’re interested in paying respects.

I don’t know if David Lynch’s passing a year ago softened my man’s resolve but he’s been feeling the sadness for this one even more overtly.  I wasn’t as close to Lollar’s art and so am less affected, but as ever, this kind of thing sucks tremendous.  Causes undisclosed, but what’s hosing down musicians by the score these days?  Don’t do drugs, kids.  They’ve gotten demonstrably worse.  Maybe that wasn’t it, I won’t pry, but still.  Fucking knock it off!

There was something about this guy that was special.  There are a lot of musicians these days that are nothing but a face.  James Gost wore a skull mask or corpse paint at every concert and in publicity material.  Not a clown about it like other masked musicians, it felt like humbleness here.  At the show he was tucked in stage right, looking smol and serious, his presence overpowered by fog machines and a searing light display. Even the light display had humility of a kind; Perturbator turned the club into Close Encounters after that.

Gost belonged to a genre where most of the bands are one or two people, often just one.  This feels significant.  Yes, it’s easier to make a full sound sans bandmates when you’re in electronic music, but it also feels apiece with this moment in time where everyone is apathetic and retiring, too stressed and fragile and deadened to accomplish anything above and beyond.  People who have the gumption to make something happen have trouble finding anyone willing or able to help.  And making art of any kind – especially more ambitious things like albums – does require you to go farther, to put in extra work.  I usually say this of people who put in the work to make the world a better place through activism, but here I’ll say it of artists – long live the fighters.

Or maybe his isolation was the result of having more vision than others would allow to him.  He was in bands before, but stuck in the rhythm section, propping up somebody else’s ideas.  His innovation was only possible as a solo act.  Darksynth emerged from synthwave, which is more video game inspired, to fold in influences of John Carpenter soundtracks, glitch, and industrial.  The result is the heaviest music I’ve ever heard.  I remember when Ministry’s ΚΕΦΑΛΗΞΘ sounded heavy to me.  Might as well be the Tetris soundtrack these days.  It has a chilling spooky vibe, but more human somehow than related genres.  You can feel the haunted guy inside the glitched beat.

And maybe that heaviness why I haven’t gone in for darkwave as much as I could have.  I’m going soft, with my ’80s nostalgia bullshit.  But I recognize greatness.  At the concert I was too wimpy and unambitious to stand with my husband down on the floor, sitting my ass on the balcony.  I had been crushing my feet at malwart during the days back then, so excuse.  When Gost came on, when the show went from death rock to darksynth, the young people stood up and danced.  In Seattle that’s as amazing as the dead rising.  I remember a fat guy who had seemingly come alone – someone who could be disregarded in life, perhaps socially maladroit – and he was willing to brave the disapproval of others to rock out to his favorite music.  I salute you, hombre.

Salute as well to the artist that moved him.  James Lollar, the Gost.  Condolences to his wife and children, to other family, and to fans – including the one next to me in bed.  It just ain’t right.

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I’m Surrounded by Some Pizzaheads

I once mentioned that Nirvana replaced Pearl Jam in my esteem, way back in teen years, quite completely.  I can still listen to Nirvana, I can barely tolerate Pearl Jam.  They had a song on the Singles soundtrack called “State of Love and Trust” that is pretty coo, “Evenflow” is kinda … alright well those are uptempo rockity jams and the meaningless yarling vocals just blend with the instrumentation.  Anything where the idea of the song is coming across, where some grain of meaning is breaching the surface of sound, well, that’s a fuckin’ mistake with those guys.

I found myself remembering their song “Black.”  There are some words to be understood in it, and others which are not.  Bad ratio.  Failure.  Here is my best recollection of the song.  I can’t actually remember how it began, which is usually my in for remembering the rest, so it’s a bit scattershot…

…Something something something something…
Oh all five horizons.  I’m surrounded by some pizzaheads.
Her legs spread out before me.  Has taken a turn.

And twisted thoughts that spin
Round my head, I’m spinnin’, I’m spinnin’,
Oh and all I wanted was.  Everthang.
Oohoohoohoohooh Ohh and all she gave me was, uh, all she was.
Whoooa

Now there’s somethin’ bad. Sayed on broken glass
Of what was everthang.
And the pictures there. Of men washed in black
Tattooed everthang.
Oh good love gone bad. Turned my world to black.
Tattooed all I had.  All I have.  All I’ll ever beeyeeyeeyeeyeeyee Wah-OGH!

Doodle doot doot doodle doo  (Eddie Vedder actually sings that shit)
I know someday you’ll have a beautiful life, I know you’ll be a star
In somebody else’s sky, why o why, why o why, Whyyyyyyyy can’t it beeyeeyeeyeeyee
Miiiiiiiiiiiiiiine Wah-OGH!
Doodle doot doot doodle doo
Whooooa-OH!

Anyway, feel nostalgic for the spooge band?  Don’t.

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Errol Flynn the Butcher

Content Warnings: Gore, Horror.

In my post-wokenment action movies have become a skosh more sour in my mind, contemplating how they could fuel the kind of national pysche that thinks war is good, that police need to be less restrained. But I’m usually thinking about that in terms of guns. What about rapiers and longbows?

American cinema and TV through most of the 20th century, when boomer opinions were being formed, violence was largely bloodless and consequence free.  Cowboys shoot people, they fall down, and afterwards we are not treated to the scene of bodies dangling from every surface around town square.  But likewise, Robin Hood or Ivanhoe pushes his sword at a guy and he just falls over the railing, body magically disappearing from consideration after the fact.

Obviously painting guns as harmless fun is the more problematic notion, as evidenced by the libertarian fantasia Adam is reviewing, and as those weapons can cause more damage more quickly.  But still, medieval weapons are nasty things.  Particularly longswords like you’d see wielded in Arthurian legend.  And medieval people didn’t have the same illusions about that.  Maybe it’s easy to forget the longer you go without a war, without print media, but I’ve seen medieval illustrations where guys are split in half, insides looking like salmon filets, blood flowing out in ribbons or sprays of droplets.  Not realistic style, but realistic damage.

I mentioned Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves recently.  That movie was more able to put a bloody slash on a sword victim than in Errol Flynn’s day, but still wasn’t quite there.  To be realistic, head should be flopping, blood shooting like a fire hose, limbs falling left and right, guts strewn across the battlements.  A few edgier movies have pushed in those directions.  Is that a good thing?  Hong Kong blood opera never really got me to “say no to guns” before, because it still showed one side as being a bunch of disposable nobodies, showed heroes as having the most hit points, by merit of their towering will and virtue.

But that’s not my point today.  Mostly, I’m just feeling darkly amused by imagining suave old time swashbucklers steeped in gore and still stepping lightly, being quippy.  Freddy Krueger liked quips too.  Let’s see Robin Hood ending entire human lives in brutal agony, slaying mother’s sons, fathers, and men of honor, just trying to defend the king.  Robin Hood laughing while you hold your guts in and fall onto a pile of your writhing and mutilated friends.  Let’s see Robin Hood and the Ocean of Blood.

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Hulking Out and Kenning Gee

last night i had a dream the hulk was on a rampage and the only way to get him to stop was for some other super-guy with super duper strengths to cut open his chest and inject a sedative straight into his heart.  a bunch of super randos were making attempt after gory attempt.

at some point within the last forty-eight hours it has crept over me that i remember not one but two kenny g tunes.  there was that one, i think his first big hit?, that’s all like “badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doo.  badoodledoo, badoodledoo, badoody-doot-doot-doo!”  then there was this other one with a vocal sample in it, some ambiguous crowd of people saying “slip of the tongue” over and over again.  “slip of the tongue, badadoo badadoo doodoot Slip! moodledoodle.”

that shit sucked boy.

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Brainjackin: Sad Endings

This one’s a little bit of a journey so bear with me.  There was a window in my twenties when I lived with my dad and his girlfriend and her two kids.  I don’t remember if this was before my brother went into the army and left the state, or after he got back to finish his last tour here, but he was around.  Hang on, was I twenty yet?  Whatever.  Throw in Bad-Moustache-Having Guy and My Tech Support Guy to round out the picture.  That lady -the girlfriend aforementioned- had a species of BPD that allowed her to run a very clean household – the kind of clean that facilitated parties.

So we arranged a movie night with big snacks and a lot of DVDs in the queue.  Or were they VHS?  Shit, I think they were VHS tapes.  Way back.  In the most memorable moment of the evening, some guy was being burned alive in Braveheart and two of the attendees said in unison, “and it stays crunchy, even in milk!”  How did they think of the same rude application of pop culture reference for that image?  We partook of all the same media, so not impossible, but it was unlikely enough to amuse.

The most consequential moment of the night came later.  I had the most staying power and after everyone else had left or gone to sleep, I feel like it was after two AM?, I popped in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.  I felt big feelings, beginning to end.  I’m mostly incapable of crying, but I cried a little.  I recognize now that you should not trust how you felt about a movie if you were watching it before dawn, but the damage was done.  I got a tattoo of the movie’s logo on my wrist.  At least it wasn’t Sister Act 2.

I still have that tattoo, but it’s gone through a few changes over the years.  First up, it was originally laid down in red ink, over the warnings of the tattoo artist.  Red is very prone to fading and fade it did.  Probably didn’t help that the heavy-handed ex-con put a lot of scar tissue into the cut, and some pigment came off with scabs.  But the symbol, where it appeared in the movie, was usually spattered and smeary.  Illegibility suited it, but years of fading later, an art school acquaintance of my husband was apprenticed to be a tattoo artist and needed victims for practice, so it seemed like time to get it touched up.

This was the friend who valiantly defended my husband and others from an art school clown attack, and she used to wear a t-shirt with JESUS IS A CUNT in giant lettering, so genial to us.  However, I cannot trust her taste in music since that occasion, because her mix at the tattoo parlor included post-Danzig Misfits – that is to say, christian Misfits, and they genuinely did sound christian.  I might be nearly tone deaf, but I can tell the difference between Creed and Nickelback.  They both suck, but the christianity of the former has a certain quality to it, better identifiable to musicians, but detectable to a discerning lay person, and I detected the shit out of it.

Anyway, the work was a little dubious and the tattoo is still a mess.  But the important thing, to my husband’s reckoning, is that it doesn’t look like a stamp from the club that I’d neglected to wash off the next day.

The important thing about all that is to say that 12 Monkeys had a sad ending and may have been the first sad ending I was ever able to appreciate.  I don’t think that speaks well to Terry Gilliam’s talents, because I was the kind of basic bitch that was not at all ready for genuinely sad endings.  He communicated this sense that Cole’s life in a time loop was a kind of immortality.  He had struggles and died young, but in the course of that life, he experienced love – and that somehow vindicated -or at least mitigated- the tragedy.  Basically, it was a fake sad ending.

Flash forward to the earliest days of going out with my husband, when he introduced me to the works of Kiyoshi Kurosawa – particularly the movies Cure and Sakebi.  Those movies show horrible events ending horribly, but still work as art, because they’re the sad mask in that ancient symbol of drama.  Tragedy is a legitimate art form that I never appreciated.  Even when first introduced to Kurosawa, I wasn’t ready for it.  I told him as much – “I recognize the artistic power of this work, but it feels like it isn’t for me.”  I wanted to see stories about heroes overcoming hardship, lovers getting to love.  Happy Endings, basically.  One of those drama masks was The Grim and Grimy One, and I wanted nothing to do with it.

But the movies stayed with me, in my mind.  I couldn’t forget them because they had that power, and from the memories of them alone, I came to appreciate tragedy in a way that I never had before.  The culmination of this came a few years ago, the first time that I ever wrote a tragic ending.  Did it work?  Was it as good as the work of Kiyoshi Kurosawa?

Surely not, but it made more sense for the piece than a happy ending would have.  I served the story at the expense of the happiness of my little babies.  That’s artistic growth, and I owe it to my husband, which makes this another instance of Brainjackin’™.  Thanks man!

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Everything I do, I do it 4 U

Hey Americans.  Yeah, you.  Remember how much you loved Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, starring the Kevin of Costner and the Mary Elizabeth of Master and Tonio?  You know it’s true.  Everything I do, I do it for you…  Bryan Adams at the top of his game.  Christian Slater doing a cockney accent.  Kevin inspiring Eddie Izzard’s bit about American Robin Hoods and Mel Brooks’s Men in Tights.  Morgan Freeman rocketing to fame.  Kevin Costner’s entire booty ass.  “I’ve never seen a noblewoman’s breasts before.”

I’m remembering this because I’ve been saying “huzzah” to low-key good news for long enough that my husband and mother-in-law have noticed, without me noticing I was doing this weird thing.  And I wondered if I got it from the episode of China, IL where Baby Cakes started thinking he was Kevin Hood, which consisted of medieval violence and saying “huzzah” whenever he appeared.  Then I just remembered that moment.

My family watching the shit out of that movie on VHS.  The soundtrack dominating the airwaves.  Not a negative word in sight.  Everybody was hyped for that goofy shit, and then it was gone, leaving a hole in our little hearts.  Dredge up your VHS player and watch it again.  You know you wanna.  Huzzah!

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