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Death Grips: 'Footage' Of The Hip-Hop Apocalypse

MC Ride of Death Grips.
Jonathan Magowan
MC Ride of Death Grips.

If Death Grips isn't the fourth horseman of a hip-hop apocalypse, its music at least tests the genre's threshold of extremity: The trio's abrasive, jittery style teeters on the edge of palatability, and plays toward a morbid curiosity to which many listeners won't succumb. From The Money Store, "I've Seen Footage" seems to run the beats from Tone Loc's "Wild Thing" and Salt-n-Pepa's "Push It" through a rusty meat grinder. Meanwhile, MC Ride tells a forceful story, as he catalogs the paranoia and police brutality that drove him to the insanity the song exemplifies.

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Anthony Fantano