Sean Kneese

Dr. Kristine Mirrer

COMM 3003-01
5/15/2014
Extra Review Assignment Script and Three Articles

In an era where most popular music lacks lyrics of substance or intelligence, underground hip
hop artist Brother Ali delivers a masterpiece of socially and politically conscious lyrics, as well
as insightful personal lyrics in his latest album entitled: Mourning in America and Dreaming in
Colour.
This fairly popular yet still underrated artist is an albino as well as a devout follower of Islam
and this is his first album since his return from his recent pilgrimage to Mecca. While some may
consider some of Alis lyrics Anti-American, I believe his criticism of some of our foreign and
domestic policies comes from feelings of love and out of respect for our founding principles. As
he says in his opening track, he believes we are a country with beautiful ideals and amazing
flaws and he hopes we can recognize our flaws so we can better ourselves and progress as a
nation. While this album does not have the same old school sound I appreciated on his previous
albums, it is still a good effort and is an album I will listen to for years to come.

Three Articles:
http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/album-reviews/id.1328/title.souls-of-mischief-montezumas-
revenge
For Souls of Mischiefs latest album they take it back to the days of the past. They rented a town
home on San Francisco's Montezuma Street with 20-year super-producer Prince Paul and
recorded Montezumas Revenge in its entirety. Its a welcomed break from the electronic
collaborations that take place and the project benefits from the tight-knit chemistry and the
organic approach that they took to make the album. The album isnt flawless but Souls of
Mischief delivered an album that rightfully stands beside their first two releases, dating back a
decade-and-a-half.

Prince Paul is a star addition to this project. He has a keen ability for creating albums that
sonically flow from start to finish, a trait that played a role in De La Soul's legendary status. He
may be far removed from hit records that garner spins, but he fosters a sonic narrative which
each emcee is forced to match. Tracks like Postal show how talented and detailed of a
producer he is while on For Real Yall the emcees ride a dope bass line and a vibing sample.
The song is blessed equally with dope verses and a catchy hook. It proves to be arguably the best
song on the album.

The Souls of Mischief have a full grasp on the skill of sharing a verse. You can tell theyve done
it for close to 20 years, yet the passion for their craft still is reflected in each bar. On
Fourmation the emcees go back and forth over a simple, but effective track. Meanwhile, on
Proper Aim each emcee kicks a dope verse that lyrically complements the verse before. Tajai
starts the track off strong with lyrics like, I stress the maximum effort / I cant relax 'cause Im
reppin' / so face the fact that Im fresher / and take it back to the essence, that highlight a dope
cut. A-Plus, Tajai, Phesto, and Opio are consistent throughout, well aware of their individual
boundaries, but not shy about pushing them. They are comfortable in their own skin and its
quite evident on Home Game a track that makes you wish summer was right around the
corner.

The album isnt without flaws. The group constantly toes the line between brilliance and
obscure. Tracks like Poets leave the listener yearning for a bit more from the crew. The Souls'
common "Im-better-than-you" tracks may actually be better than most recent releases, but
theyre nothing revolutionary, and they fail to match up with some of their classic cuts in the
Hiero catalogue. Prince Paul puts forth a righteous effort, but even he is guilty of delivering
some off the wall beats or bland sample like You Got It or Hiero HQ. Even these so-so
efforts, that are occasionally seen throughout the 18 tracks, are passionate records. They go hard
on every verse and that alone is commendable.Listen To LaLaLa

Souls of Mischief prove that they can still put out a dope consistent effort and have fun doing it.
While Hip Hop is stuck in the age of conformity, the Bay Area originators of the abstract are still
pushing the limits and making music that feels good to them. The bottom line is Souls of
Mischief know who they are, and who their audience is and isnt. They arent trying to become a
group that they arent and after 20 years of kicking rhymes, they still have plenty more to say.
The end result comes out fresh, even if the occasional track misses the target. Montezumas
Revenge may have been created by Prince Paul, but its told by Souls of Mischief and it is quite
the entertaining adventure.
http://thequietus.com/articles/13366-krs-one-return-of-the-boom-bap-review
Few artists have circumscribed the possibilities of their art more thoroughly and with such
panache as KRS-ONE. As a teenager, his perspicacity about hip hop and what it might mean was
as breathtaking as it was audacious, and in the second decade of the 21st Century he continues to
act not just as the culture's spirit guide and conscience, but as arguably its consummate
individual creative force.
High praise? Yes, but not hyperbole. This is an individual who, as great as he is and as confident
as he has every right to be in his own abilities, never forgets that his creative achievements are
the sum of hard work, application, consideration and concentration - and that means they are
within easy reach of anyone else prepared to work as hard and with similar focus or direction. It's
kind of like a superpower: sometimes, you'd swear KRS is clairvoyant.
Example? Well, take one point in 1988, where, having already invented* gangsta rap and
foreseen its up and down sides on Boogie Down Production's epochal debut, Criminal Minded,
Kris finds himself in the middle of a rhyme, speculating on hip hop's potential for longevity,
lasering in on its major weaknesses, then lays bare a truth that plenty of people still haven't wised
up to:
"I'm not Superman, because anybody can
or should be able to rock off turntables,
grab the mic, plug it in and begin.
But here's where the problem starts: no heart -
because of that a lot of groups fell apart.
Rap is still an art, and no-one's from the old school
'cos rap is still a brand-new tool;
I say 'no-one's from the old school' 'cos rap on a whole
isn't even 20 years old
Fifty years down the line you can start this
'Cos we'll be the old school artists"
'I'm Still Number One'
For this writer, those lines only started to make complete, crystal-clear sense for the first time
when, at a point in the late 1990s, I heard a younger fan referring to Nas as "old school". But
Kris had seen the future. In some of his recent gigs he's taken to doing a freestyle-based routine
in which he tells the audience that he's not just there on the stage in front of them, but he's also in
the hotel after the show, looking back in his mind's eye to the events earlier that evening, and
that this future self is, in effect, standing in the wings, communicating with the physical
manifestation of his spirit that is standing there in the present. It's poetry and art, so it doesn't
need to adhere to the evidential standards of science - but there's something real and true and
unarguable in the thought that, if you're constantly thinking about how you'll view your actions
tomorrow, you might stop yourself doing something stupid or damaging or contrary to your
principles today. Anyway: here's evidence of an artist not just ahead of his time, but with
decades of experience of predicting the future. Shit, he might be a time-traveller too, for all I
know.
But back to 1993, when a series of tides were beginning to turn. Today's conventional histories
of hip hop will not, in the main, speak of KRS as an old-school artist - he belongs, in the
canonical narrative, to the music's first great Golden Age, the 1987-1992 period where the genre
found its voice, hit its stride, became the most important and interesting sound around. The
Chronic is the widely accepted endpoint of the Golden Age, for a number of largely agreed-upon
reasons, but the one that matters here is the way it turned what had hitherto - despite the
occasional hit single - been an underground music into mainstream pop. Within five years we'd
have Wu-Tang becoming the first hip hop group to have an album go straight to Number One in
both the US and UK pop charts in the week of release; Puffy would shortly have a hand in three
consecutive US Number One singles and top the Billboard charts for half a year. Eminem wasn't
that far away. And yet, despite Dre and Snoop, such dominance of the mainstream was
unthinkable when Kris began work on Return Of The Boom Bap, his seventh album (if we
include Live Hardcore Worldwide, the first live rap album - and we should, absolutely), but the
first to be released under his name rather than that of Boogie Down Productions. He'd formed the
duo-led family after he met the DJ and social worker Scott La Rock in 1986 - Scott worked in a
homeless shelter; Kris moved in - and he kept the name, even after Scott's 1988 murder. To this
day, no new KRS album is released without the legend "Overseen by Scott la Rock" somewhere
on the package. (As with so much in Kris's career, there's an element of prefiguration there, too:
Scott's murder remains unsolved, pre-echoing the same tale that would play out again and again,
from Pac and Biggie to Jam Master Jay.)
Look again at those lyrics to 'I'm Still Number One' and consider the lines about lack of belief
and fortitude causing rap groups to jack it in - then fast-forward to '93 and think on Kris
discarding the BDP name, and opening what was bound to be seen as somewhat of an under-
pressure album after the commercial disappointment of the last BDP record, Sex And Violence,
with a song called 'Outta Here', in which he discusses why rap groups don't have lasting careers
at the top of the game. Why did he go there? What was there to gain? Not as much as there was
to lose, certainly - but this is an artist who revels in risk-taking, who lives to answer the questions
others are too chicken to ask. Half the time you can kinda give those detractors who find him
self-defeatingly contrary (and a bit pompous with it) some kind of credit: this is, after all, the
man who called for an end to black-on-black crime and the often poisonous posturing and
aggression that seemed to course through the 1980s rap scene following Scott's death - then, a
few years later, claimed absolute justification in elbowing the blamelessly pacifist PM Dawn off
a New York stage. "Stop the violence: or he'll kill you," as a caption to an illustration
accompanying an album review in the NME pithily put it. But, to 'Outta Here', the matter at
hand: what on earth was he thinking?
The name-change wasn't a rebirth or reinvention: more, really, the sort of thing that happens
when a Hollywood studio reboots a film franchise - partly a recognition of the status quo, partly
a sleight-of-hand to enable Kris to take his records up a notch. He's spoken recently - in a
fascinating interview published by DJ Premier - of how Sex and Violence's comparatively
modest sales, and the negative reaction even from fans to the PM Dawn incident, had effectively
killed his career; and while he was still shifting enough records to be comfortable for his own
purposes, the confidence his label - Jive/RCA - had shown in him was ebbing away. A reset was
necessary to reinvigorate the support structures around him: but that need also seems to have
helped him find a new path, a new niche. Reconnecting to his past and to the fundamentals of the
genre right at the point where it was about to go mainstream, Kris began to believe in the task as
not just one of personal importance, but of absolute necessity to the art form. Within months he
started telling interviewers not just that he was doing hip hop, but that he was hip hop: a subtle
yet seemingly egomaniacal shift, yet, when he explained it (anyone who is doing hip hop is
living hip hop), less a boast than a quasi-religious mission statement. The next two decades of
philosophising and theorising take root here: it's impossible to envisage a book like his The
Gospel Of Hip Hop (published in 2009) had he not gone through this period of re-immersion in
the culture's core values.
In any case, BDP had always been a slightly confusing construct: there was Kris and there was
Scott, but who else was a member? All those guys on the inner sleeve photo on the By All Means
Necessary LP? And if so, who were they all? DJ/producer Kenny Parker, Kris's brother - he was
surely part of BDP; and D-Nice, the teenager who'd had a few words on Criminal Minded, was
in the car when Scott was shot, and was embarking on a (partly Kris-produced) solo career, too.
Ms Melodie, Kris's wife, had also signed a solo deal. (BDP as proto Wu-Tang, anyone?) So it
was fairly flexibile, but confusing to fans - all without being sufficiently adaptable to allow Kris
to work on BDP records with people outside his core crew.
He'd been doing quite a bit of that in the preceding months, too: a track with Tim Dogg, 'I Get
Wrekked', still stands among his most bravura vocal performances, while his appearances on
Shabba Ranks' 'The Jam' and, particularly, R.E.M.'s 'Radio Song' introduced him to mass
audiences unlikely to have bought many BDP albums. And he appeared on those records as
KRS-ONE, not Boogie Down Productions. Add that to his evident desire to work with producers
from outside his immediate circle, and the name-change made complete artistic sense, regardless
of any label pressure or political imperatives. Opening the record with a track analysing failure
strategies employed by lesser talents - and doing it in the form of a narrative that began to lift the
lid a little on what had gone on behind the scenes with BDP, in the early days, up to and shortly
after Scott's death - well, that was just consummate Kris.
Around this time, he collaborated with Jonathan Demme's nephew, Ted - the creator of Yo! MTV
Raps - on a prospective movie about the early days of BDP. Joe Doughrity, fresh from assisting
director John Singleton on Poetic Justice, wrote a screenplay. It was called Wheels Of Steel.
HBO were reputedly involved, but the film was never made. Copies of the script - which is a
must-read for anyone interested even peripherally in the Kris and Scott story - still exist. The
point in mentioning it here is just to reinforce the idea that not only did Kris know about
branding and knew how to tell a story - he was starting to place a value on his, and looking for
new and exciting ways to tell it.
The step-change that ...Boom Bap brought over the preceding Boogie Down Production records
is in the production. That's not to denigrate what had gone before - even the unfairly and widely
maligned Sex And Violence had an abundance of material of true excellence, with some
genuinely startling moments both lyrically and musically - but as rap was changing, studio styles
and techniques were moving on, and Kris knew better than to get left behind. With his stature in
the music he could have turned to practically anyone he wanted, but he chose the hip hop purist's
favourite, Gang Starr decksman DJ Premier, as his main collaborator for this notional debut.
(There are five producers involved: one track comes from Norty Cotto, two from Kid Capri,
there's a killer single from Showbiz and, alongside Premier's five tracks, Kris contributes four
himself, with the two collaborating on another.)
Primo was the perfect choice for the central concept Kris was building. Hip hop was entering the
Valley of the Jeep Beats, as the notional "band name" of Public Enemy's DJ Terminator X would
have it: room-shaking head-nodders were in vogue, and Premier, who talked of never being sure
a beat was ready until he'd road-tested it in his SUV at high volume on the streets of New York,
was the king of the style. ...Boom Bap, for all its maker's canny strategising and apparent
foreknowledge of how the genre would soon grow, is less a record built to capitalise on that
future success, and more about repositioning its maker as the keeper of the true flame. This is an
exercise in going back to the basics, and making that move synonymous with authenticity and
integrity. In that regard it was every bit as much a trend-setter as Criminal Minded had been six
years earlier: soon there would be a retro hip hop bandwagon for nostalgists to jump on, but
before then, there was going to be the little matter of the music becoming the biggest-selling
genre in the world. Getting ahead of the curve should be no problem if you talk to your future
self: but still, this particular piece of brand realignment was remarkable.
'Outta Here' and the lushly orchestrated, genuinely moving closing rumination on pop and
politics, faith and belief, 'Higher Level', stand among Primo's greatest yet least-heralded
productions. Both songs are less the work of a studio craftsman than an alchemist. The former
adds a jazz double bass to a beautifully looped, meticulously crafted, cleverly short sample from
'Funky President' in which the horn stab from the original song appears almost as an echo of
itself - another ghostly premonition. It's the perfect undercarriage for a lyric dark as coal and
bleak in portent. By contrast, 'Higher Level' takes a thematically unpromising base metal - a cut
from Gene Page's soundtrack to the blaxploitation horror spoof Blackula - and turns it into an
exultant and genuinely prayerful piece of melodic yet hardcore hip hop. Of course, the space
Kris insists on building into the song is a vital part of making it soar - the first lyric doesn't arrive
until towards the end of the second minute, with an unrushed emcee seeking to calm his listener
and relax into the mood. Regardless of how it works it's still a remarkable track, a rare moment
of real reflection in a genre that usually stresses machismo and chest-beating.
The other thing that's striking about ...Boom Bap is the way that it's only those two songs, at
either end of the record, that don't feature some element of reggae or dancehall. How conscious a
decision it was to bookend a ragga-rap album with two hip hop tracks is moot: but that's what
happens. Dancehall was a natural step, and a long-extant part of Kris's musical armoury ('9mm
Goes Bang' and 'The P Is Free', from Criminal Minded, stand among the earliest attempts at
melding hip hop and ragga, which of course share a common root in the Jamaican dancehall
tradition). But he hadn't put it front and centre to this extent before, and he wouldn't do so again.
Even the rock-hard second single, 'Sound Of Da Police' - which remains a key part of every KRS
gig, and, 'Step Into A World' notwithstanding, is probably his best-known track - finds him
riding Showbiz's inspired Grand Funk Railroad-covering-the-Animals loop in a shouted cadence
that comes straight from the dancehall, and dropping in and out of patois as he goes.
Yet perhaps just as surprising is the fact that you can listen to the album a hundred times and
never think of it as a reggae record: Kris clearly saw, heard, and felt, in this outsider music, a
means of giving hip hop back some of its original spike and bite, so the style is subsumed into a
hip hop mode of working. Ragga was then the music generating shock and controversy, albeit
hardly in the most laudable of ways (the previous year, a reissue of Buju Banton's hideous 'Boom
Bye Bye' had turned the music into the most divisive genre in the world, and its defenders were
increasingly regarded as reactionary apologists, if not outright bigots).
And yet, more than any social or political or those-who-are-not-with-me-are-against-me
resonance, what KRS found in dancehall was a sound where a stripped-down aesthetic still
prevailed. Hip hop had, by and large, abandoned its early bass, snare and 808 minimalism of the
start of the Golden Age - a string of records, Criminal Minded key among them, had introduced
the James Brown-centric funk sample sound, and the melodies those musical fragments
contained, to the genre. Return of the Boom Bap, then, was an attempt to reset the clock - to go
back to the essence of beats and rhymes, and remind both dedicated fans and curious outsiders
that a cute lift from a recognisable and unexpected musical source wasn't what hip hop was all
about (not that there was necessarily anything wrong with that), and that, ultimately, the worth of
an emcee can only be judged by their lyrics and their skill on the mic. "Boom, bap, original rap,"
as the title track puts it: "Refreshin' when you hear it - real reap is all that."
So the lion's share of the record isn't about the 'Outta Here' storytelling or the 'Higher Level'
philosophising - it's a red-hot throw-down, a dazzling display of the art of rap. You can drop the
needle pretty much anywhere on the album and hit a couplet that astounds. Crucially, it's not so
much about the writing - though that's strong throughout too - but the performances. Even
something self-evidently "just" an album track, like 'Mortal Thoughts' (though, perversely,
chunks of the song appear in what is nominally a video for '...Boom Bap', which was released as
a third single but with a promo that's really more a four-minute advert for the album as a whole),
finds Kris unleashing a vocal blitzkrieg. Written down, "any rapper can be a decapitated
rapper/now what's the matter?" has a certain frisson, but to hear it rat-a-tat-tatting from his mouth
at double, triple, possibly even quadruple time, is to bear witness to the most emphatic kind of
lyrical assault.
It's a cheeky record, too - from the Bryan Adams reference that opens the title track (well, he had
interpolated Billy Joel on 'Criminal Minded' too, so he had previous), via that wry punchline -
you can almost hear his head-to-one-side "gotcha!" grin - to 'Sound of da Police's comparison
between police and plantation overseers ("they both ride horses!"), to the outrageous three-
minute extended metaphor that is 'I Can't Wake Up'. Plenty of rappers have talked about dope in
their records, plenty too have essayed comparisons between stylistic potency and the effects of
high-grade weed: but nobody else ever claimed, through the device of light-hearted metaphor, to
be the fuel that gave a string of illustrious named contemporaries their inspiration. Well, none
that got away with it, anyway. This was something only Kris could do: only his formidable
talent, hard-earned reputation and his status as one of the few whose work consistently enlarged
and defended hip hop as a culture would cause the other lions in the hip hop jungle not to
challenge him for the position at the head of the pride. As the man says: "you never will conquer
the champion."
It's a great record, one of his very best, and resuscitated his career despite - as he points out in
that 2012 interview - not really selling any better than Sex and Violence had. It began a triptych
of three great albums under his solo name which re-established KRS as the quintessential emcee,
the hip hopper's hip hopper. The self-titled follow-up might not be the most consistent release of
his career, but it contains three of the best tracks he ever made - 'Rappers R N Dainja', 'MCs Act
Like They Don't Know' ("If you don't know me by now, I doubt you'll ever know me/I never
won a Grammy, I won't win a Tony") and 'Ah Yeah' - while 'I Got Next' put the keystone in
place at the top of the edifice he began building on this record. With 'Step Into A World', Kris
achieved everything he threatened and promised here: he had taken the fundamentals of hip hop
culture, in all their rawness and authenticity, refused to compromise on anything, never dumbed
down, and still had a worldwide pop hit with it. He could have quit right then and nobody could
take anything away from him: that he has continued to make records which confound and delight
without ever stopping being true to who he is and the art form he is inextricably bound up in is
something we can only marvel at and continue to be grateful for.
* Yeah, I know; Schooly D, and so on. But '9mm Goes Bang' was the template everyone built
on, even though most of them didn't think to include the morality-play elements that made the
song so memorable and successful.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/18779-death-grips-government-plates/
Whenever Death Grips get accused of bad intentions, theyre usually guilty of bad judgment. Its
easy to understand why people get offended by their dick moves, both literal and figurative. But
for anyone invested in the group as an artistic entity, all of this retro and regressive Punk 101
chicanery serves as a distraction or a depletion from music that derives a purer shock value by
sounding like it has no real precedent. If nothing else, their fourth album Government Plates is a
reminder that, right, Death Grips make music! And it drops without any narrative context or
controversy about its packaging, its label situation, or their disappearance from social media
like your parents, Death Grips have a Facebook page and unlike NO LOVE DEEP WEB or Sky
Ferreiras album, Government Plates boasts a cover that wont get you temporarily booted off
the site. With a lack of external talking points and most of indie rock's ire currently being
directed elsewhere, Government Plates loudly reestablishes Death Grips as a group freed by
having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future.
And heres the squalid moment in which Death Grips find themselves: a bottle breaks, an air raid
siren serves as MC Rides alarm clock, and he defaces his scrambled, arrhythmic rapping with
batshit shrieking. Is it meant to suggest that hes waking up from a bad dream? Or is he just
being tasered mid-verse? As you might expect, Government Plates spends about half its time
expressing its paranoia and the other half justifying it; enforcers are shadowy and lurking, their
use of power always theoretical and impending, spelled out in the titles for people who have no
interest in engaging with the thrilling music herein. But are we to cut through the battered radio
soundclash of Bootleg (Don't Need Your Help) and the mesmerizing drones of seven-minute
closer Whatever I Want (Fuck Whos Watching) with Occams Razor and assume its all
directed at Epic or concert promoters?
You could do that, though Government Plates functions as a Rorschach and not just because
many of these songs are ugly, amorphous inky splatter. Throughout, Ride smears words and
multiple meanings unwittingly tease themselves outdarting over and through Zach Hills
drums like they're a tire maze, Ride mutters L.A. creeping under my skin, or possibly scales.
This is from Big House, so is the title an understood synonym for prison or a reference to how
Death Grips blew Epics money by living at the Chateau Marmont? During Birds, is Ride
saying I got higher, I got fake? Or is it, I got hired, I got fake? I got hired, I got paid? Is it
a critique of drugs, of corporate influence or a boast about how Death Grips have made a career
largely out making people who give them money look stupid?
Its easy to assume something this purposefully noided is Death Grips crafting a response, that
theyve been cornered by the music industry, expectations of fans, something on the outside. But
to conclude that Death Grips are reacting to anything strips them of their unique power. You will
learn nothing about how they feel about, say, about Obamacare, the NSA or Yeezus, a record that
may have not been directly influenced by Death Grips but was likely aware of their existence.
Death Grips may have endured a tough year, but they brought almost all of it upon themselves,
and Government Plates is a pointedly proactive record that seeks out its own stimuli; and thats
why their pranks are nowhere near as interesting as their self-inflicted stunts. As with Bikram
yoga or a hunger strike, artificially heightened circumstances help them realize internal purity.
So Government Plates isnt defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort,
Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that wont stay still. You might think
he loves you for your money but I know what he really loves you for it's your brand new leopard
skin pillbox hat is a good place to start. Thats an unwieldy title that at least has room to say
everything it needs to. The song itself cramps what could otherwise be a wubbed-out dubstep
appropriation into a gawky 6/8 meter. Ride discovers a staggered cadence that works between
corroded pinwheel synths and drums that evoke the crunch of a stomped cockroach during
Anne Bonny. Then the beat switches just to see if hes willing to contort himself into its spaces
(he accepts).
You can certainly project anger onto Death Grips, its tough to imagine happy people making
this kind of music. But hey, might as well party at ground zero. Death Grips can actually be fun,
or at least promise a payoff to all this stress. In that way, it recalls The Money Store, which in
retrospect was the kind of album a major label wouldve been very pleased with after signing
Death Grips, i.e., one with actual bars-and-hooks songs. Government Plates is also filled with
hooks, if you remember that the word is also a synonym for a boxer connecting flush with your
face. MC Ride is every bit as percussive as Zach Hill, and Zach Hills drums can prove to be a
mouthpiece thats more fluent and expressive than its human counterpart. Two Heavens and
Im Overflow in particular are hip-hop as survivalist minimalism, merging little more than
vocal texture and percussion into chest-puffing B-boy boasts.
And hell, Death Grips can be kinda funny, too. You cant be this premeditated with knowing
what people think about you and if it wasnt clear that a) there is a joke and b) Death Grips is in
on it, theres a song called This is Violence Now (Dont get me wrong). Remember when MC
Ride namedropped Magical Mystery Tour curiosity Blue Jay Way and Santanas Abraxas on
The Money Store? If not, the first song on Government Plates is a Bob Dylan reference. If a
Dadaist Death Grips nursery rhyme sounds hilarious in concept, thats because Birds is pretty
much just that. Ride sneers I cop this attitude at all times, in a posh, flippant accent, the kind
attributable to someone vapid enough to say I cop this attitude.
An awkward one-off upon its original release, Birds serves as a pivot for Government Plates,
the point where new Death Grips starts to become Death Grips doing something legitimately
new. Some parts of Government Platesare actually pretty and not in that perverse, S&M way.
And during the second half, they get awfully close to proper dance music, or at least its rigorous
structure and of course, this formalism makes for even more interesting tension. Feels like a
wheel is Death Grips take on HI-NRG drum and bass, which is to say, it focuses less
on emotional ecstasy than the artificial components and side effects of the club drug, the toxic
chemicals and fried nerve endings. The only intelligible lyric is let me live my life, which turns
the title into a double entendre, it could mean rolling or just being stuck. Im overflow about
sums up how Death Grips react to stability and yet it hinges on Rides most straightforward
battle rapping, punctuated with a yell of hot shit!
Government Plates isnt here to teach you a lesson. When Death Grips are overt about what they
think, they often come off like bratty teenagers, acting out against people who want to help them.
Unlike the blunt, confrontational NO LOVE DEEP WEB, Government Plates lets you think for
yourself and even if it doesnt have an agenda, that doesnt mean its nihilistic. Its music that
doesnt care about how you feel, just how you react to it. All the same, it doesnt exist in a
vacuum and when Death Grips interact with the public, they can produce something elemental,
in a literal sense where the periodic table can take violent turns: oxidation, sulfur fumes, nitrous,
horrible fluorescents and neon, fossil fuel. Or, maybe a hydrogen bomb, with all of its attendant
amorality: Death Grips provide the power, you provide the politics.

CHECKLIST FOR PLAGIARISM
1) (X ) I have not handed in this assignment for any other class.
2) ( X) If I reused any information from other papers I have written for other classes, I clearly
explain that in the paper.
3) ( X) If I used any passages word for word, I put quotations around those words, or used
indentation and citation within the text.
4) (X ) I have not padded the bibliography. I have used all sources cited in the bibliography in the
text of the paper.
5) (X ) I have cited in the bibliography only the pages I personally read.
6) (X ) I have used direct quotations only in cases where it could not be stated in another way. I
cited the source within the paper and in the bibliography.
7) (X ) I did not so over-use direct quotations that the paper lacks interpretation or originality.
8) (X ) I checked yes on steps 1-7 and therefore have been fully transparent about the research
and ideas used in my paper.
Name: ________________Sean Kneese______________________ Date:
______05/16/2014______________________