I was recently on my way about about 4 o’clock in the morning at the back of an empty coach to a test which I didn’t want to do for a future which I don’t really want, and I was looking through a list of the most complicated words that could be involved in that test.

One of them was “Abrogate”, and in a sleep-stupor, when it was so dark at night that on the abandoned, unlit roadways it seemed like there was truly nothing, nothing, nothing outside, I realised that I didn’t know what this word meant, and so I checked the definition:

Abrogate: verb (used with object), abrogated, abrogating.1.to abolish by formal or official means; annul by an authoritative act;repeal:to abrogate a law.2.to put aside; put an end to.

I immediately remembered that MC Ride had used this word (how could anyone forget, how could the line not occur when the word is brought up ever again) to startling effect on Black Quarterback:



Eddy baby, Eddy’s crazy

Kadabra, abrogate me



- Death Grips, Black Quarterback

“The Powers that B”- the powers that control the law, the powers that set the law, the net that controls a potentially radical set of human bodies, the thing which is expressed as an interior set of controls for your own shininess, for your own self-care, which comes to express itself in power structures as something that wants to keep you “a shiny clown for me, and the powers that B”. Across the double album Ride speaks as a kind of interior for you yourself, which we might simplify as the reptile, or the Id, but he’s more like what you’ve discarded, what the alternative option for your expression was which you can’t even notice the motivation for anymore.



So “Abrogate me”- kill me, erase me “by formal or official means”- but look how goddamn powerful “abolish” is here. Change me, eliminate what I represent, deny me by law. The word, which is on the GRE test as a complex one, which I didn’t even know, happens to hold together the most gorgeous group of reactions and ideas to do with the “powers”. “To put aside”, “To put an end to”. As if by magic- Kadabra- arbitrate me to the sidelines. Considering what Black Quarterbacks have been doing for resistance to the “Powers that B” recently, the song seems uncannily prescient. “Kadabra”, maybe the wave of a media wand, maybe the wave of the law wand to abrogate, the twin tools- and aren’t twins always important in Death Grips- of those powers to control which radical figures do and don’t suddenly appear by the flash of a TV screen, the disappearance of audio from the headphones. To abrogate someone is the biggest weapon available for those powers.

Ask the biggest fan of Death Grips who his top 5 rappers are and it will never, ever, ever occur to him to mention MC Ride. It’s a curious phenomenon and I observed it in myself recently. People just DON’T think of him as a rapper. It’s probably because rap is constantly self-referential, unlike songwriting for other genres. That is, you rap about yourself, and about real life, and MC Ride doesn’t do this, so maybe people mentally qualify him as a songwriter because they don’t hear who he is in his music, or in his extremely rare interviews and appearances.

Or maybe it’s because he shouts a lot and a lot of it sounds like obscenity and nonsense. And for my final point I don’t want to make it sound like I don’t think rappers have impressive vocabularies- but to me it’s pretty beautiful that the single best usage of a word in English literature, I think we can say pretty confidently, goes to a guy, a rapper, no less, who most people think just yells, a word for which marks get awarded on a bloodless and strange word test. He’s just a bit ahead of every other lyricist in hip-hop. I can’t even look at this one usage of abrogate and really think to myself that any of the other stuff must be random or unintentional. There are plumbable depths to Death Grips lyrics and in the moments when a word is most crystallised we feel them in their fullness best, they stay with us.

When I was trying to find the right definition for “Abrogate” for this article I googled “abrogate definition” once, then I turned back on myself and googled “abrogate definitions”. I turned to poetry, I turned to plural meanings, I turned to MC Ride, I turned to the simplicity of more than one possible meaning for words, to the idea that words exist in a net with many connections to other words while those words still sit as their own meanings.

