"I’ve Seen Footage" and the horrific discovery of desensitisation
The Money Store by Death Grips is just my mass media degree being chaotic and having fun
“Amusing candy-coated anarchy” is what Apple Music says about The Money Store by Death Grips. There aren’t any clear proclamations of anarchy by any of the experimental music group’s members, namely main vocalist Stefan “MC Ride” Burnett, drummer Zach Hill and producer Andy Morin. In fact, the band has famously refrained from being labelled as a “political band;” it likes the term “freaks and outsiders” better.1 Still, one can’t deny that MC Ride is a rebel. Even though he is reluctant on sharing his political standpoint, his music spells out anti-establishment. Even the label of an “outsider” as he likes to call himself is somewhat built in non-conformity. Death Grips’ persona is all about deviating from the convention, the norm. Their music is neither “punk,” nor “hip-hop” necessarily, though it shows characteristics of both, but a secret third thing altogether. And often, their fans are the very reason why the interesting discourse behind their artistry gets drowned out through cursed images, dank memes and shit-posts.
Perhaps the worst thing I have come across on the Internet as a music critic is the meme-ification of musicians to the point the meaning behind their music gets diluted to a series of badly cropped deep-fried images that spell dry Gen-Z humour. MC Ride is way more than simple edgy meme material. And granted, Death Grips as a group tend to be more on the chronically online spectrum than their musical peers, but it’s still painful to see their art get watered down to being a “scaring the hoes” Instagram post, or get called “pretentious” or “elitist,” no in-between. To clarify, I don’t think Death Grips is pretentious the least bit. In fact, their official major label debut The Money Store is still on the palatable side of most industrial or noise-inspired “Hip-Hop” music (using the term Hip-Hop with a grain of salt here, because I know Death Grips wouldn’t want their music to be put into a box). Once you get deeper into the experimental music rabbit hole, you will find endless creative acts out there making stuff so abrasive they make The Money Store sound like a lullaby. Death Grips are still a household phenomenon. They barely even scratch the surface of what “pretentious” truly means.
But does this mean their music is insignificant? Certainly not. I first listened to The Money Store in early 2021- my first Death Grips album- and surprisingly enjoyed it a lot. I believe I wasn’t old and wise enough to fully understand most of the themes on the record, but now as I relisten to it, as a Mass Media student, there is SO much on the project that makes sense. People talk about Zach Hill’s batshit crazy drumming skills, MC Ride’s earsplitting nerve-wracking microphone roaring and Andy Morin’s deafening production frenzy, but very few have pointed out the genius behind their lyrics. Which is why, I’m going to try and break down what I have gathered from the crown jewel of their nascent project- I’ve Seen Footage.
I’ve Seen Footage is the lead single of The Money Store, and without a doubt, Death Grips’ poppiest song to date. I’m being 100% serious when I say that I would unironically play this song on the aux. It’s upbeat, it’s chaotic, it’s fun. It reeks of rebellion, for some reason too. It sounds like something one would play while vandalising the city with their friends in their car in the dead of the night. You get the vibe.
The lyrics, however, are anything but that.
For context, The Money Store is an album of sorts. It’s named after The Ziggurat, the State Government office in Sacramento, the city the trio hails from. The album cover, designed by digital artist Sua Yoo, dons a peculiar artwork consisting of, in the band’s words, “An androgynous masochist on the leash of a feminist sadist who's smoking.” I don’t think anything can get more chronically online than that. The album in itself paints the picture of a desolate dystopian future. Each track in the album addresses a topic that makes up the complete vision- be it police brutality, a vulnerable tale of a schizophrenic man battling his demons with addiction, misanthropism and drug abuse among others. Ride’s lyrics are extremely ambiguous and vague, and his explosive delivery makes it even harder to grasp the true meaning behind his songs, but in some way, the band’s boisterous performance style ends up going hand-in-hand with their disastrous subject matter. It all somehow works out in the end.
I’ve Seen Footage clocks in halfway through the album, and in a way, comes off as the culmination of all topics discussed- rather, thundered- in the first half, all packaged into a sonic banger. When asked about the title, Hill recounted the incident when he met a man called Snake Eyes in Sacramento. “A friend of ours recorded him on the porch in a conversation– he didn’t know he was being recorded. He was all fucked up on drugs and shit, just rattling off all this crazy information… So we were talking about moon structures, and Snake Eyes says, “I’ve seen footage! I’ve seen footage of it!” he mentioned in an interview with Pitchfork, which has since been deleted.2
MC Ride envisions himself trapped in the hellscape of “footage”- constant sharing and resharing of pictures that he cannot bear to see anymore. He reminisces on the ghastly violence of the ghetto he hails from, only to be forced to see it over and over and over on the Internet. He is trapped inside a recurring virtual nightmare with no escape. He keeps hollering “I’ve Seen Footage! I stay noided!” but there is no one around to listen to him. They are all buried in their phone screens, distributing their footage to as many people as they can.
“Don't touch me
Whats up wit it
I stay noided, stimulation overload account for it
Desensitized by the mass amounts of shit”
The word “noided” is interesting. Sources suggest that it is supposed to be an offshoot of “paranoid.” Ride is paranoid upon seeing the hapless dissemination of information that no one even feels connected to. They are all poker-faced and soulless, plastering images and videos of whatever they can find on the walls of the World Wide Web. And when a police siren interrupts the endless cycle of chain mail, no one even cares to look.
Ride is simultaneously attempting to escape the crass photo evidence of ghetto violence with the cops. He feels all the eyes on him. He is threatened by the grazing eyeballs crawling on his skin to not make a move. One wrong step, and his action will forever be encapsulated in a phone camera lens. There is no way for him to delete it out of existence, because of the gross number of times it has been shared. Amidst the hullabaloo, he realises how the over-accumulation of Internet footage is not only weakening the people around him from their conscience and emotions, but also supplying the cops with unlimited evidence of ghetto violence. Ride takes a committed anti-cop stance here- Hip-Hop, nevertheless, is built on opposition to police brutality- but he also manages to explain how desensitised the masses have become to the portrayal of gore and violence on media.
And this is where what I have learnt about Media Theory comes into play. What does Ride mean when he says the masses have been “desensitised”? Let’s take a walk down media psychology, shall we? This is going to be a bit of a History lesson too, so bear with me.
Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov, defined the term “classical conditioning” as respondent learning or learning through association. While observing how his dog salivated naturally at the presentation of food, Pavlov realised how the dog also salivated upon hearing a bell, which indicated the arrival of food. Through this, he determined that the dog associated the sound of the bell with food, which prompted his salivation. He also noticed how he salivated simply at the sound of the bell as well, even when there was no food present afterwards, pointing at how environmental stimuli can stir up natural, involuntary, reflex reactions in animals, which he later discovered happens in humans as well.
South African psychiatrist, Joseph Wolpe, founded the Systematic Desensitisation Therapy, on the basis of Classical Conditioning. This technique involves the person ranking the causes behind their fears and anxiety in a hierarchical manner, and learning to combat them gradually by simultaneously being engaged in a relaxing activity, so as to associate the object of fear with relaxation instead. Desensitisation Therapy was meant to reduce the harm of anxiety in patients, by detaching their “sensitivity” from certain elements through step-by-step guided exposure. However, the association of fear-inducing factors- like violence and gore- with “calmer” topics has only led to its normalisation in media, which has led to rather grave results.
Drabman & Thomas stated in 1974 that studies show that the more violence a child watches on TV, the less sensitive they become to real-life violence. This means that children who watch a lot of TV violence are more likely to tolerate aggression and be less responsive when they see violence in real life. Owing to this discovery, Griffiths & Shuckford concluded in 1989 that when people see violence in a relaxed setting, like on TV or in movies, they gradually have weaker physical reactions to violence over time. What does this mean?
There was a time when you would flinch at the slightest sight of blood, but you can probably watch hours and hours of gore easily now. Violence finds its way in almost every media product that we consume- music, movies, shows and even video games. More often than not, it is shown in a romanticised light. Blood lust is showcased as something to be desired, and the consumption of such visuals has come to us at a heavy cost- our humanity.
We live in turbulent times. Everyday a post about a new mob lynching shows up on our Instagram timeline, and we mindlessly like it, without giving it a second thought. And while the sentiments of sharing posts like these are mostly genuine- spreading awareness for example- shouldn’t we practise a little concern while sharing footage of the deceased? Aren’t we supposed to be just a little respectful while sharing dozens of pictures of the dead, as their loved ones mourn away. Do we still feel the pang of anguish inside us when we see a mutilated body?
Or has even the pain that others go through simply become a source of entertainment to us? Or worse, a source of pleasure?
Anyway, back to the song.
Ride further provides us with examples. He talks about the constant surveillance of people’s pain, forever captured in the form of Internet footage. He talks about the footage of a soldier killing a child, cops shooting down civilians, an ambulance running over a Brazilian pedestrian, among other things, while the people around him- well-off and well-disconnected from the real world- fail to feel the slightest amount of empathy for the victims and continue to engage in their compulsive over-sharing. Their blood lust isn’t satiated here- they go on to rewind the horrific video clips, watching them in slow motion and replaying them over and over. “Seen crazy shit, man, crazy shit,” is what Ride chants in the bridge, with clear revulsion and pure disgust, not from the footage itself, but people’s nonchalant, inhumane and unbothered reaction to the mass incarceration they see on their phone screens.
The music video for I’ve Seen Footage is pretty clever too. The entire video is a brilliant mosaic of, well, footage. It features pictures of random things- some of them are the Death Grips members rehearsing, or indulging in wild activities. Each picture lasts barely a second, and soon after we’re thrust into the next one, symbolising how fast-paced the digital world has become, thereby contributing to our exceptionally low attention span. But whatever you say about it, the video sure looks fun. It matches the musical mood of the track- cynical and haywire- and does an excellent job at masking the true intentions of the piece.
It is mind-boggling how much research it took me just to analyse one song that has a skeptical man roaring into the microphone what seem like a bunch of nonsensical lyrics on the surface. And maybe they are truly nonsensical and meant to simply be enjoyed in boiler sets and not spent hours researching on like a nerd. But what can I say? I love reaching. I love making mountains out of molehills. And who knows, maybe MC Ride is a well-read lyrical genius, along with being an all-round creative, and we simply don’t give him the props for it. Maybe Death Grips is way more than your dank irony shit-post band, and maybe you need to cave in and read a little, instead of simply losing your mind over Fantano’s next 10/10.