I had been waiting for this moment for more than four years. Enter my favorite band of all time, Death Grips. Enter a raw patchwork of excited screams from the crowd. Enter crimson stage lights drowning every head in the venue.
Welcome to red-alert intensity. Welcome to “System Blower,” with its unmistakable, urgent opening. Goodbye to my wallet and car keys.
How about that? On the very first song of the set, I had lost almost all my valuables. Perhaps it was foolish to have these items on me, but these particular shorts I was wearing had served me well many times before. But why should I have assumed this would be like any time before? Regardless of whether I was an idiot or not, my wallet and car keys were gone. I couldn’t give less of a shit.
That’s not to say these items are dispensable — they’re the exact opposite, obviously. But Death Grips forced me to secede all care; the crowd — a great web of pissed off, fast-firing pistons — forced me to fight for survival. I had no choice but to have one of the greatest times of my life.
So, on that night, you could find me whirling between bodies, stripping myself of worldly thought, sweating off all consideration of a tomorrow or a next week or a next month. There was no past, no future. There was no defining feature to me except how hard I could possibly go in this moment, how far I could possibly distance myself from the features and concepts of a tangible life.
This was a show that would not, and could not, stop. Even transition songs boasted mosh pits. There were people fainting into each other’s arms all over; there were people rushing to the floor’s calmer edges with a sort of horror on their face; there were legions of us tumbling, crashing and quickly picking each other up at every MC Ride scream, at every explosion of a synth or collapse of a guitar strum.
Trying to take a good picture of the band was an impossibility for me. I managed to take one semi-decent video during “Black Paint,” but in terms of photographs, here is the best I could do:
These aren’t even photographs of the band, so the best I could do wasn’t very good at all. Depicted here seem to be the souls of the damned, and then their transition into crescents of fire. But hey, I’m sure there are quite a few people in this world who would look at this concert, and the people at it, and call us damned souls. Megaphone in hand, they could say that we are hellbound. If that’s where we’re all going in the end, at least there was this night. A night where I felt like I had shed every layer of my skin, where we were all just clear, non-distinct bodies trying to ram into each other, trying to sink as deeply as we could into the music.
As my friend and I drove home that night and recounted the bruises, the sprains, the people we scooped from the sweat-ridden, beer can-infested ground, we couldn’t help but realize how our thoughts and emotions had been perfectly stifled in the chaos. I suppose one could call that “losing yourself in the music,” but for both of us, that had happened many times before.
When we saw Taylor Swift together at Ford Field, we were completely lost in each and every one of her deeply relatable eras, but at Death Grips, we felt that we had entered somewhere beyond human experience. We were not lost in gorgeous woods or snake-filled bars or midnights where we felt a truly human yearning; we were lost in a place where there are no names, no faces, no hands to clasp so as to say, “We are flesh and bone; we are filled with complex thoughts and feelings; we are creatures of beauty.”
How the hell was I supposed to be grounded as a human when “Steroids” kicked in and I was screaming “My whole life, my whole fucking life” over and over again, essentially littering the ground with my vocal chords? How the hell was I supposed to know the limits of my body as I leapt as high as possible to the screaming of “Destroyer!” in “Lock Your Doors?” How the hell could I be anything but a loose gas particle bouncing in ever-increasing fury?
It’s so odd for us to have felt so inhuman in the midst of such a deeply human band. Yes, even with MC Ride’s declaration that “I am the beast I worship” in “Beware,” Death Grips hits at the human experience like few have done before. At times, their discography seems to represent a disgust with the self, the struggle to love it, the burden of finding some kind of wonder in its relation to the absurd. For as beastly as their live show may have made me feel, I know that humans are all-powerful in the context of Death Grips’ art. It is those of our flesh that hold the rope, in the end. And it is those same people who choose not to use it.
Within all the horrors and crags of the human experience, what excitement lies within! I look back on 3 a.m. nights in a shutdown 2020 world, those nights where I’d be flailing all over my room to “Three Bedrooms in a Good Neighborhood,” “Inanimate Sensation,” “Punk Weight,” “Turned Off.” I look back on empty, cavernous days where, through waves of angered, hopeless thought, there were beasts on the horizon blasting “BB Poison” in a Mad Max wasteland.
I daydreamt all the time. I still daydream all the time. And I think of those beasts on the horizon sending red dust to the sky with sneers on their faces, their hearts 101% full. And now I realize that those beasts have always been human. They have been those who give their all under flashing red lights. They have been those who throw themselves into sweat-stained, stinking whirlwinds. They have been those who scream every word to the agonizing, shimmering labyrinth of a song that is “Up My Sleeves.”
I have few excuses to ignore the beauty simmering just over the horizon, now. I’ve waited four years to see the sun shine so bright. Maybe it’s silly for something to mean so much to me; maybe not. But while slouched in sterile office chairs; while driving through cities where every street looks the same; where every block has the same restaurants; where each car window sheds the same loneliness; while boiling in a general, shared malaise; I need something to mean so much to me. That thing may not even be Death Grips: It may be some intangible thing they unlock. Some strange hope.
As for my lost wallet and car keys, I found them after the show. The wallet was rather beaten up and two non-essential keys were missing, but the essentials were there. Miraculous, really. And very fortunate — those items tend to mean quite a bit in the physical world. Thank you to those who held them up. I appreciate you endlessly.
