![]() ![]() Under Donald Trump, covering the presidency and covering the president’s Twitter feed were two sides of the same coin. Of course, they always find what they’re looking for. There are journalists who spend their entire day covering bad tweets as if they’re news and others who search Twitter for confirmation that those bad tweets are based on prefabricated theses. Because virality is the currency of the realm and nothing fuels virality more than outrage, Twitter is an open spigot of outrage, commodifying mob anger into a slurry that spills across the internet and cable news and ultimately back to Twitter. And as Jonathan Haidt recently argued in the Atlantic, this change has led to the stupidification of much of American life. Now, Twitter - and social media generally - is the narrative. They were all in the mosh pit, invincible for a moment.The times have changed. For last week’s show, I stood next to a 15-year-old boy, his broken arm in a cast, and a couple that was at least over 50 years old. Subversive music cannot die, the torches are just passed along, from hardcore punk to gangsta rap and everything in between. The “punk is dead” narrative never truly existed - people just stopped looking in the right places. Everyone moved as one solid unit, with the crowd swelling backwards and forwards in unison, all drawn to MC Ride’s hypnotic, aggressive delivery. Later, I found myself staring at Zach Hill’s drumming, his sticks blurring together on what looked like a child-sized drum kit. I was close enough to see MC Ride’s eyes nearly roll back into his head. Their priority is not in any sort of visual aesthetic, but rather the absolute thunderstorm they invoke onstage. Just eight blue stage lights dimly lit the stage, and MC Ride never had a spotlight on him. When they did take the stage, the lights were as low as possible. Part of me was terrified the band would not show, after their infamous no-show Chicago concert, where they put instruments onstage, along with a projection of a fan’s suicide note, and never showed up. Most importantly, they anger as many people as they can. They exist to mess up your head, to give you the tools to experience rage, catharsis and ecstasy all at once. They embody punk in every sense of the word, even if there are no guitars onstage, or recognizable song structures. “I feel like Kanye would ask them, and they’d say no,” she said. I asked my girlfriend and junior philosophy major Jillian Bradford that night if she thought Death Grips and Kanye would ever collaborate, considering Yeezus took heavy inspiration from their early work. They do not care what Pitchfork says about them. They do not care if you like their music. ![]() every sense of the wordĭeath Grips do not care about you. I hugged the rail at the front of the venue, breathing whenever the crowd let up for half a second, absolutely mesmerized by the dissention I saw in front of me. ![]() This time, the band was not obscured by swirling clouds of dust, thrown up from the absolutely brutal circle pits between me and the stage. It is easy to look from the outside in and hesitate to swallow the hype, but anyone who has seen Death Grips will inevitably say the same thing - they are one of the most important bands to release music this decade.ĭeath Grips’ show last week at the Fox Theater in Pomona was the first time I had been close enough to catch MC Ride’s spit, but I caught their set at FYF last year. It has become a joke in and of itself to put Death Grips on a pedestal, and herald them as the saviors of indie music everywhere. They exist at the pinnacle of indie-music-publication-nirvana, from the ravings of the “Internet’s Busiest Music Nerd” Anthony Fantano, to gushing Pitchfork reviews and countless memes. But it also makes it difficult to talk about Death Grips with any sort of hyperbole and still be taken seriously. unified among meme pagesįor one, it is wholly bizarre a band so divisive has found itself unified among meme pages everywhere. It really is a shame Death Grips has become so prominent in meme culture. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |