Among its many esteemed peers, “On GP” by Death Grips is the best song about killing yourself I have ever heard.
I said this to a friend recently and he just stared at me, confused. Despite being a long-time Death Grips fan, I struggled to convince them that the song was actually about suicide. Just skimming the lyrics, it becomes really obvious, really fast, that the song isn’t just about killing yourself in the abstract. It’s basically a scream for help.
And yet, I’ve found that time after time, conversation after conversation, that meaning still gets lost among the noise.
Death Grips is a Sacramento-based experimental hip-hop group. If you’re terminally online, you’ve probably seen memes featuring the band’s lead singer MC Ride or heard some of their songs mixed into edits. Above all, the band is known for its abrasive sound, cryptic lyrics and the overall unhinged persona of MC Ride.
In November, the group announced their first new album in almost eight years through social media.
“The Writing and recording of our next album is underway. We’re looking forward to the new Death Grips record,” the band said on Instagram.
The statement, signed by group members Zach Hill and Stefan Burnett, MC Ride’s real name, noticeably leaves out member Andy Morin, fueling speculation that he’s left the band. But that’s a different story.
With a new album on the horizon, it’s the perfect time to revisit Death Grips as a project — an ambitious slice of the hip-hop world that reveled in experimental production, mysterious stage personas, primal live shows, unpredictable stage antics, and its complex, often contradictory fanbase.
And the one song that kinda captures all of that.
“On GP” is the second-to-last track off the group’s fourth studio album, Powers That B, from a period when they were getting even more experimental with their sound. This song taps into the full range of emotions around suicide, from its overwhelming rage and despair to the feeling that you can’t ever do it because you would let down your family. It’s most certainly the most intimate song the group has ever produced and to my knowledge the only song where MC Ride ditches his stage persona and refers to himself by his real name.
The first exercise that I will undertake here is to convince you, dear reader, that “On GP” is really about suicide. Let’s begin.
The song begins with a simple assault of blown-out synth, aggressively-strummed electric guitar riffs and drums, followed by approximately six minutes and eight seconds of gut-wrenching, emotional lyrics screamed at the listener in the typical fashion of MC Ride, some of which I have provided below:
Kill ‘cause I can
This body by my own hands
Well that was fast. But let’s listen on a little further.
My friends and family won’t understand
So I stay in the end, don’t make none to me
If wasn’t for them, I’d make that decision on GP
The GP in “On GP” stands for “general principle.” It’s this idea of street fairness where rules and honor codes govern everyday actions. As in, if he weren’t beholden to the loss his friends and family would feel, Ride would kill himself just on principle.
If that wasn’t convincing enough, MC Ride also has a literal conversation with Death part-way through the song, who hands him a weapon to kill himself with:
Last night, three thirty in the morning, Death on my front porch
Can feel him itching to take me with him, hail Death, fuck you waiting for?
Like a question no one mention, he turns around, hands me his weapon
He slurs, “use at your discretion, it’s been a pleasure, Stefan”
Like I said earlier, this is the only time that the frontman for Death Grips has ever dropped his MC Ride persona and referred to himself by his actual name, Stefan. The way I read it, he’s not talking about killing the MC Ride persona in some metaphorical, figurative way. He’s talking about putting a fucking gun in his mouth.
And yet, with the song’s meaning so clear, how come so many of my friends don’t associate it with suicide?
I think it has something to do with how most people find the hip-hop group, which is probably how you found them too.
Death Grips has undoubtedly benefited from becoming an internet meme. I haven’t met a single fan of the band who didn’t come into contact with them through the internet. But this kind of exposure is a double-edged sword. The band has become an entity outside of itself. The meme of “Death Grips” is different from what Death Grips really is.
In the music world, the group has become an aesthetic—more proof of your music-enjoying credentials than an actual band that produces passionate, meaningful pieces of art.
And on the other side of things, you have the people who treat Death Grips as a joke, the people who completely buy into the MC Ride unhinged persona. They interact with the music as far as they can clip videos of the front man screaming together and laugh at it. These are the people you see going to Death Grips concerts with spinning propeller hats and generally being obnoxious.
The irony is stinging.
As a project, Death Grips’ music is a reaction to the internet and internet culture. It’s about seeing things that people shouldn’t ever see posted on LiveLeak. It’s the constant bombardment of entertainment frying your brain. It’s the extreme loneliness that people feel, despite being the most connected we have ever been.
The internet creates an angry, aggressive, confused generation of people like MC Ride, akin to putting a dog in a cage and mistreating it until it knows nothing but hate. The meme itself has washed out the meaning behind their songs.
I’m not sure what to make of this phenomenon. I’m not sure if it is a condemnation of us—the listener, of internet culture or what—that such a deeply personal and emotionally intimate song about contemplating taking your own life has been completely washed out, totally replaced with the aesthetic of an internet meme that the group itself didn’t ask for and has no control over. There’s no real point here, my friend would say yadda yadda death of the author and all that, but personally, I think this is nothing short of a crime.
Anyway, go take a listen to the song and see what you think.
