For quite some time now, 4chan’s infamous /b/ has included this sentence at the top of every page: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” It’s a pseudo-disclaimer, an ass-covering of sorts that probably wouldn’t stand up to any legal scrutiny if there were ever any actual motions set in place to crack down on the elusive illegality that floats in and out of the threads there, which – themselves – come and go regularly. More importantly, though, it’s essentially the slogan plastered on the archway of the place – the “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” motto greeting every newcomer, warning them exactly what to expect: a cesspool of trolls trolling trolls. (Dante’s original line would probably be just as apt a descriptor of the place, actually.) It’s a mentality that extends to a majority of the site’s other boards, filled as they are with extreme sensibilities and viewpoints seemingly running contrarian to a decent portion of the outside world – sometimes people are representing their viewpoints accurately, but generally they’re just trying to get a rise out of you, the naive browser who stumbles across a thread detailing exactly why you’re an idiot for liking game/movie/show/band/team X, and when you step in to defend X – or to agree with the original poster’s assessment – you just encourage more baits to be thrown into the metaphorical water.
I only bring this entire concept up because I recently read a New York Times article – a positive review of a Yung Lean concert – that referred to the Swedish rapper as “Tumblr-influenced meme-rap”. (Yung Lean probably deserves his own article here, at some point – at the very least, he’s an inspiration to white teenagers everywhere, living proof that if you get good enough production on your instrumentals and carry yourself ironically enough, you don’t actually have to be skilled at rapping to get people to listen to you. According to the Times, though, he was actually good live – so what do I know?) It’s a descriptor that set off – well, not quite alarm bells, but at least some sort of internal hesitancy in my brain, as the last time I heard the phrase “meme rap” was in an offshoot of the aforementioned cesspool, casually dropped as a descriptor of bad, ironic, and legitimate rap acts alike; in other words, a bait, designed to coax heated responses from individuals unable to discern that – just maybe – their unknown counterpart on the other side of the screen didn’t actually believe that Lil B and Kanye West were equivalent in artistic stature. It was a phrase designed to marginalize otherwise enjoyable and/or artistically significant music by lumping it in with the low-effort, mass-appeal, low-content imagery that tends to spread across the Internet like a virus, supposedly deriding its targets for being shallow, yet managing to sucker listeners into believing in the artists’ worth by virtue of their music being catchy.
I always thought that, as far as provocations go, the idea of “meme rap” was a relatively tame one. “Low-content music designed to stick with the listener” – ironic in origin, or not – comes pretty close to an accurate description of pop music; most artists would not take the idea that they are veering too close to pop sensibilities as an admonition. (Yes, there’s the whole “not selling out” ethos that prevails in artistic circles, but “popular” is also shorthand for “music that a majority of people enjoy” – assumedly artists, to some degree, make music in order for others to enjoy it, and would prefer if a majority of said others appreciated their music.)
Most artists are also not Death Grips, who made a song decrying pop music and released it on an album whose cover was a picture of a penis.
My personal first exposure to Death Grips was listening to “I’ve Seen Footage” off The Money Store, the band’s second album (first, if you count Exmilitary as a mixtape). I imagine my reaction mirrored a lot of people’s upon initial exposure to the band: fittingly, a meme to describe the supposed “meme rap”. Listening to the entirety of The Money Store, I absolutely hated it; the production on each track appeared to be a new attempt to be an affront toward the concepts of rhythm and harmony, and the “rapping” was barely discernible shouting. After a few more run-throughs, I decided I kind of liked “I’ve Seen Footage” and that I probably wouldn’t return to the rest of the album, chalking its positive reception up to a combination of others both having differing tastes and searching for an innovative sound; if nothing else, Death Grips were certainly different than your average rapper(s).
I think it’s around here that you’re probably expecting some sort of sentence like this: “After my fourth time listening to the album, though, I found myself singing along with the growingly catchy hooks; suddenly, the production seemed more genius, its initial off-kilter sensibilities falling into place as MC Ride’s shouts became more discernible – and more repeatable – by the minute.” Nope. I did revisit The Money Store several times, waiting for some sort of inspiration to strike, waiting for the epiphany that would convert me from a dissenter to a frothing madman yelling “I’M IN YOUR AREAAAAA.” I kept up with the band’s progress, intermittently checking in when they released something new – No Love Deep Web (the album with the aforementioned penis cover), Government Plates, and finally, niggas on the moon – the first part of a double album, and, by recent accounts, their final album; the group is breaking up. Each time, I hoped that this would be “the one” – the collection of songs that would flip my internal switch, make the lightbulb go off, let me view the rest of their works in an entirely different light.
I can’t say this ever happened; the closest I got was finally deciding to listen to Exmilitary. Maybe I should have started there in the first place; it certainly contextualized the rest of their work quite well.
“Accessibility” and “familiarity” are the key concepts here; maybe “rhythm” as well. The majority of Exmilitary comes much closer to traditional rap sensibilities than nearly anything Death Grips released subsequently; the distorted sampling and minimalist, bass-heavy production of the two above songs were certainly abnormal, but not enough to approximate a cacophony. Ride’s voice – while certainly still not the most legible – rounded to form as a hyper-aggressive complement to the dark instrumentation, a kind of cross between the pure energy of someone like Waka Flocka Flame and the overly wordy (and occasionally meaningless) verbal labyrinth of an Aesop Rock. The trend of the rest of their discography became a little more clear – this is a group that had started, nominally, as a rap act, and decided to move farther and farther away from that ideal, while keeping enough of rap’s external trappings to elude having their classification altered.
The group’s true genius, though, was in their ability to concentrate each individual song into an instantly recognizable lyrical identifier. If they were making pop music, one might call it the “hook,” but generally such a descriptor implies melody or rhythm, rather than a lyrical affectation that can generously be referred to as “hobo shouting”. You hear it in the two linked songs; “IT GOES IT GOES IT GOES”, “I FUCK THE MUSIC / I MAKE IT CUM”, etc., and you hear it in nearly every Death Grips song at some point. Ironically enough, it’s a formula most pop artists would kill for – make every song have at least one line or phrase that sticks in listeners’ heads well after they’re done actually playing the music itself. Oddly enough, though, it’s also where their supposedly disparaging descriptor comes full circle. If we take the idea of a “meme” as being some sort of concise idea made to spread rapidly, then, in a different sense from the term’s original intent, Death Grips were surely the ultimate “meme rappers”; they were exceedingly good at transmitting memorable, repeatable phrases to their listeners, enticing their fans to replicate said phrases themselves. It’s a rare talent, one that sadly might have been wasted on a band that seemed more concerned with turning themselves into a circus sideshow via a whole mess of controversies: no-showing live performances, releasing albums for free with no promotion to spite their label, and releasing said albums under controversial circumstances – the aforementioned penis cover, for example, or using “niggas” in their album title despite the fact that 2 of their 3 members were white. You get the sense that the entirety of their lifecycle was meant as provocation, real-world baits displaying similar sensibilities to those of their online critics; an entire band as an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. So it goes (it goes it goes it goes), I guess.
Dry Roasted Peanut Gallery 
