photo by Tom Spray
As you’ve probably heard by now, the Sacramento band Death Grips have broken up. Generally speaking, this is no big loss: Good bands break up all the time, and there will never be a shortage of new ones to listen to. Time is unsentimental that way.
I'm not sure Death Grips' music was the most salient part of who they were. While I still enjoy The Money Store, I can’t remember a note of NO LOVE DEEP WEB, even though I devoured it upon release. What I can remember is that the album was reportedly leaked against their (major) label’s will and featured a cover photo of its title scrawled across drummer Zach Hill’s erect penis, springing out from the corner of the frame like some softcore jack-in-the box. Whatever music was contained therein was basically an accessory to the newsflash.
Forget for a second that bands are bands that make things as permanent as “albums” and remember that they are also stories: Dynamic, twisting and uncertain. Good ones don’t just make music; they draw our attention to the context and history in which that music is being made.
So what kind of story was Death Grips? One prevailing submission is that they were rebel heroes with the fortitude to ignore strictures of contract and expectation in favor of the mysterious rumblings inside their heart. Trent Reznor, who had invited them to tour with Nine Inch Nails, responded to the news of their breakup by asking, “Why would I have ever thought those dudes could keep it together?”
Colloquially put, they were punks, with all the attendant romance and self-implosion that implies. Witness the wonderful photograph of MC Ride perched eagle-like at the top of Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, where rooms start at $435 a night and F. Scott Fitzgerald stayed while Los Angeles crushed out whatever life he had left in him. Ride stands literally alone and literally on the edge, arms spread out against an implied crucifix. Almost as afterthought, his middle fingers are up, new buds on a fuck-you tree.
Another story is that they were spoiled dicks who made life difficult for the people most committed to supporting them. I remain unswayed by writers defending their no-shows as performance art, not because I believe so religiously in the contracts of the capitalist exchange but because in general I think it’s nice to do what you told people you were going to do. Worse off than any executives who scrambled to clean up the band’s public-relational diarrhea are the fans, who trudged home from venues having arrived wanting nothing more than to bathe in the band’s strange light.
To paraphrase Bill Callahan, the truth is in-between. Sticking it to your label and putting pensies on your album cover are not radical acts. Implying that your band belongs to nobody—not even yourself—is, or at least could be.
What made Death Grips’ story compelling was that it was without moral or direction. Never fully independent, the band could only define themselves in opposition to the parental presence of their label. Never fully obedient, they learned to make a spectacle of their own bad choices. As heroes go, they were bratty and misguided. I’m tempted here to write that maybe being bratty and misguided was the point, but in my most respectful and adulatory moments I would say that I’m not sure Death Grips had one.
Of course, none of this would be relevant had their music not been interesting. Daily, hourly, bands all over America break up in spectacular ways to an audience of no one.
But controversy—however teenage—has a way of galvanizing people, and entertaining them too. It is a superseding force, for better or worse.
I’ve heard writers talk about how a novel’s first line can in some oblique way forecast the last, such that the work seems to circle back on itself and almost magically becomes whole. I’m glad Death Grips broke up. I think I’d been waiting for them to all along.