“It goes, it goes, it goes, it goes…,” and it just keeps going. The persistent repetition would be an apt way to describe the experience of listening to Death Grips’ album The Money Store. It does not so much come into the room as kick the door down, move the furniture outside and set it on fire, and wonder why everyone looks so shocked.

The album by the Sacramento-based three-piece was released in 2012 as the second full-length record, and it resides in an uneasy position between hip hop, industrial music, noise music, punk, electronic music, and other genres of music that don’t care about belonging to any of such categories.

Most of all, however, the ugliness of the album is not accidental.

Such characteristic is what makes The Money Store intriguing to analyze through the concept of the carnivalesque by Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of abjection by Julia Kristeva. Initially, it may seem like overly scholarly frameworks to analyze an album.

It seems like the product of mixing a synthesizer, drum set, microphone, and quite a lot of misbehavior in a blender, but Bakhtin and Kristeva provide a framework for explaining why the music of Death Grips is so excessive. The album subverts the boundaries, organizing social life as respectable versus vulgar, clean versus dirty, high versus low, human versus beast, pleasure versus disgust, and discipline versus excess.

The carnivalesque of Bakhtin can be of great use since the carnival is a temporary suspension of hierarchical and orderly relations. It allows everything which is generally considered inappropriate to become primary. Authority can be ridiculed, polite behavior can be turned around, bodily functions can be used as an object of laughter, and social differences can become insignificant. The carnival is noisy, excessive, obscene, corporal, and collective. It is turning the world upside down and laughing at it.

Death Grips function in a very similar way, taking aggressive, obscene, paranoid, sexual, technological, monetary, and violent discourse and going so far away from all the norms. The outcome is like a musical carnival.

What is crucial about the carnivalesque is the vulgarity. The carnival makes its own kind of sense through vulgarity, rejecting the notion that serious cultural work needs to be neat, controlled, polite, or beautiful. At the heart of The Money Store, it produces beauty from ugliness, repetition, distortion, aggressiveness, and excess. The result is like seeing a perfectly rendered painting vandalized by spray paint and finding how the vandalism has improved it.

Definitely, Death Grips know what makes pop music work. The Money Store isn’t an exercise in making difficult to listen to. There are times when it’s ridiculously catchy. “I’ve Seen Footage,” for instance, is a pop music impulse which gets subjected to the usual brutality of Death Grips. It’s a song which has enough of an immediate rhythm to be appealing, yet refuses to be a nice pop song. It means that it has a sharp, artificial sound and feels more like it was delivered by a broken speaker.

Based on a combination of attraction and disturbance, carnival is enjoyable. People are attracted to carnival because the laws are abandoned. The Money Store follows a similar pattern, hostile but it is pleasurable, ugly but it is also addictive. It seems hostile, but at the same time it is insisting how the listener remains.

MC Ride seldom sounds like a voice disconnected from his body. Instead, he sounds like his voice originates in the throat, lungs, muscles, and nervous system. He can shout, bark, gasp, growl, threaten, and laugh at once in one song. Significant from the Bakhtinian standpoint, the concept of carnival is inseparable from the notion of the grotesque body. The grotesque body does not represent an immaculate, self-enclosed body which is typical of representations of ideal beauty. The body feeds, perspires, bleeds, penetrates, defecates, ages, grows, shrinks, and overcomes its limits.

The presence of an open body is always highlighted throughout the performance of MC Ride. There is no suggestion of having a fully controlled voice when you listen to the voice of MC Ride; the voice seems to be highly physical and has the capacity to rip itself off. In such a way, the album’s vocal performance allows the body to be heard through its voice.

When put in dialogue with Kristeva’s idea of abjection, the abject refers to a thing which must be rejected or cast away for the maintenance of a coherent subjectivity. Body waste is one clear example. Blood, vomit, feces, rotting, and similar materials are certainly part of the body. However, the problem arises in terms of what happens when we step across the line between the inside and outside.

Such fantasy of bodily containment is assaulted by Death Grips, which does not care about maintaining bodily integrity through the music; everything bleeds into one another from noise, anger, sexuality, violence, sweat, breathing, and dirty language. What is created is an aesthetics, seeking contamination. The pure listener is assaulted with the dirty music, the disciplined body meets the undisciplined voice, and the proper social subject meets the improper language.

Abjection in the work of Kristeva happens before interpretation. A certain feeling of revulsion or disgust recognizes first the boundary that has been violated, then tries to find out what it signifies.

There is a sense of how the music is invading. The way the bass, drums, distortion, and vocal delivery are done seems to suggest how the music is entering into the physical space of the listener. It is, in effect, about being invaded by it.

Vulgarity within The Money Store is a full-on aesthetic approach to art. Death Grips always denies the clean and elegant language typical of decent and civilized behavior. The lyrics flow into money, sex, violence, drug abuse, technology, paranoia, body parts, intimidation, and the bizarre without offering a clear moral point of view for judgment to the listener.

Carnival is conducted similarly, because Bakhtin’s is not a theater where people observe performers commit acts of transgression from a safe place. Lines are blurred between the performers, the audience, the lofty, the base, and respectable and obscene. Everybody becomes involved in the mess. Similarly, The Money Store would be hard for a listener to stand on the sidelines of the music and think how “such grotesque people” are “over there.” The music drags the listener along into excess.

However, The Money Store is a particularly apt title. A store is an arrangement of desires into objects with a price, which can all be seen on display and, in theory, purchased. Yet, the material contained within is defiantly uncommercial, refusing to be placed in the neat packages of a consumer culture. It is filled with noise, violence, obscenity, technophobia, and excess body, like the shopping mall has become a circus.

However, it is not how the band has transcended capitalism and has started criticizing it from a pure standpoint. Otherwise, the album loses its appeal. What seems to be disturbing is the idea that the revolt against the system is also a commodified one. The vulgarity can be bought, the anger can be streamed online, and the defiance can be made into an album, distributed via a major record company, analyzed by critics, and enjoyed by consumers.

While there is a suspension of the social order, it returns to normalcy at the end of the day. The role of carnival is such of an arena where hierarchy is mocked and overturned. In similar manner, during the period of The Money Store, conventional notions regarding what music should be are totally turned upside down.

In fact, its strength might just be found in the contradiction. It is a commercial product which is reluctant to be the kind of commercial product it was intended to be, and marketed using the same means as any other record but seems intent on destroying such means.

“Hacker” is possibly the best illustration of how all such aspects of carnival, technology, and abjection have come together in the same composition. Firstly, it introduces the character of a person working against the system. However, unlike the restrained nature of a cyberpunk story, the imagery in the song is fragmentary and excessive, as though such weird phrases emerge out of the blue, giving an impression of language being out of control.

Traditional popular music depends upon the listener’s ability to identify the pattern in order to understand what comes next. “Hacker” supplies the listener with a certain pattern, but messes up the pattern with images and shifts, introducing familiarity but corrupting it in the process. In such a way, the song operates as a kind of circus version of technological culture.

In the case of “I’ve Seen Footage,” the connection to Kristeva can be easily made considering its interest in media experiences. From the title alone, it refers to footage of an event that has taken place. The listener is placed in a situation wherein experiences have now been rendered a thing which can be recorded, replayed, shared, and consumed.

It results in a form of abjection. The horrific event is brought into the safety of the domestic environment via the screen, becoming entertainment and consumable; the divide between reality and representation is corrupted, and the shocking event is turned into just another digital media image in the endless cycle of digital media consumption.

In many ways, Death Grips’ music appears to understand such a state intrinsically. In the album, the songs create an auditory space where the listener undergoes sensory overload. The distortion, compression, and rhythm of the song appear to reflect a world where too much information comes in too fast.

For Bakhtin, the grotesque body was always in the process of becoming, transformation, and open towards the external world. The Money Store creates such a subject through technologies. The human voice keeps mixing up with all sorts of electronic noises, the organic percussion undergoes digital production, and the performance of MC Ride is impossible without Zach Hill’s drumming and Andy Morin’s production.

Certainly, it is decidedly more complicated. Technology turns into an extension of the physical aggression of the body, and the body turns into one more part of the machine of technology. The music clearly indicates that the modern subject has already been compromised by technology, networks, media, and commodities.

Shock value alone becomes predictable. As soon as we know how the artist is going to offend us, then the act of being offended becomes a formula. Death Grips are more exciting because the vulgarity is part of the whole composition of the music. The beats are vulgar because it does not flow smoothly, the vocals are vulgar because it does not contain any restraints, and the production is vulgar because it is far from being a clean sound.

Everything is leaking.

The term “leaking” becomes extremely relevant in relating Bakhtin to Kristeva. While the former’s grotesque body remains open-ended and open, the latter’s concept of the abject comes into play when distinctions between self and other become blurry and confused. Thus, both theorists pay great attention to boundaries, and The Money Store is basically the album dedicated to breaking boundaries.

The distinction between hip-hop and noise fades away, the line between music and noise gets blurred, the demarcation between the artist and the character becomes fuzzy, the line between pleasure and disgust gets blurred, the distinction between commercial music and experimental music loses its relevance, and the demarcation between listener and performer gets dissolved by the physical nature of the music.

In terms of the clear hooks or moments on the latter, the accessibility of The Money Store is greater than such of Exmilitary. However, the accessibility of the album makes it more dangerous, as it provides an entry point into the excess.

At the same time, the pleasure which is offered by carnival breaks the expectations and comes with the pleasure. Death Grips can create a catchy tune and not be safe at the same time.

“Punk Weight” is an example of such a phenomenon. The song’s rhythmic drive borrows from the familiar conventions of popular music. However, the production distorts such conventions to become much more aggressive. The song understands the fact how genres are things which can be taken, twisted, and reshaped. It is another form of carnival in the sense that all cultural boundaries are stripped of such power.

“The Cage” provides an alternate take on the same approach. Through its odd setting, the piece establishes a claustrophobic experience, and at the same time, the title loses its metaphorical quality and becomes more of a state. The listener is both inside and outside of the cage, both seeing and experiencing the cage. In terms of Kristeva’s theory, it becomes important as the cage can be seen as a boundary defining the subject. Inside, there is a fixed position, while to escape is to cross the boundary.

In light of the foregoing discussion, the term “rebellion” seems insufficiently complex to describe what the work does. Rebellion presumes that there is an authority against which the rebel acts. The Money Store undermines the very institutions, making the difference between authority and rebellion possible. Its vulgarity renders the difference between high culture and low culture problematic, its bodily excess undermines the difference between civilized and animalistic behavior, and its imagery of technology challenges the difference between humanity and technology.

For several minutes, the usual standards of musical taste, physical discipline, linguistic propriety, and cultural classification lose their hold.

However, carnivals have always been defined by temporality, about showing how it is possible for the world to be different, if only temporarily. Death Grips shows us through the use of vulgarity as art how arbitrary such of our social and aesthetic boundaries truly are.

Perhaps, it is the album’s most impressive accomplishment, managing to make excess productive. Usually, excess is viewed as needing to be stripped away. Too loud, violent, vulgar, sexual, weird, aggressive, much, but The Money Store makes all such things “too much” the cornerstone of its style.

Probably, its ugliness is the means by which it creates beauty. The grotesque is the skin of the music, its form, voice, rhythm, persona, etc. The album demands attention and forces the listener to deal with all of the things which respectable culture rejects.

The role of Bakhtin here provides an explanation for why the experience is enjoyable. With carnival, the vulgar becomes liberating, the ridiculous becomes powerful, and the body becomes resistant to the rigidity of social control. Kristeva’s role explains why the experience can also be uncomfortable. With abjection, what we are rejecting is terrifying because it is ourselves. What is disgusting is upsetting because it exposes how unstable our borders are.

Death Grips force the listener to both laugh, cringe, dance, get tense, and question whether the music has become physically menacing. Aggressively, it is absurd enough to be comical but seriously absurd enough to be intimidating, and it is vulgar enough to be funny but not ridiculous enough to cease being menacing.

Once the album ends, the carnival officially concludes. Order is restored, the headphones are removed, the listener is returned to such other, more respectable, orderly world, technologically mediated as it may be, which he inhabited prior to MC Ride’s shouting over our speakers. However, an upset has occurred. Lines have been crossed, if for a brief period. The listener has been made aware how the supposed clear distinctions between beauty and ugliness, pleasure and disgust, civilization and vulgarity, and body and machine are less stable than we are led to believe.

After all, it elevates The Money Store above being an aggressive rap album or a one-off experiment of 2012. The true brilliance of the work lies not in the fact that it sounds different. Many records sound different. What it really accomplishes is transforming difference into experience. It makes excess listenable, vulgarity rhythmic, the grotesque danceable, and abjection catchy.

Perhaps, the strangest thing about the whole affair is how the listener comes back for more. The music goes. It goes, it goes, it goes, and we keep listening.

References

  • Bakhtin, M. M. (1984). Rabelais and His World (H. Iswolsky, Trans.). Indiana University Press. (Original work published 1965)
  • Death Grips. (2012). The Money Store [Album]. Epic Records.
  • Holquist, M. (1990). Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (2nd ed.). Routledge.
  • Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (L. S. Roudiez, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1980)
  • Vice, S. (1997). Introducing Bakhtin. Manchester University Press.