So Death Grips announced on their website this morning that the title of their new album is “Year of the Snitch”. I want to speculate (with not much information to go on as of yet) as to what their project is with this one.

Now a few months before this happened the official twitter and instagram started posting the phrase “Death Grips is Online”, and eventually the twitter began to retweet any tweet made with that phrase in it, with any image that was attached to that tweet.

What happened was that, for the first time, Death Grips seemed to be openly acknowledging, or at least coming into contact with, their meme-status. Loads of Death Grips memes and other dumb photos and random anime shit got posted to the official twitter, which is normally extremely reticent and irresponsive (like the band usually is towards their fans).

What I think Year of the Snitch means to imply is that the snitch is all of us, because the radical speed at which information is becoming shared, harvested, moved around is not inherently bad, but in the current climate, or the climate we are moving into- year of the- it seems to Death Grips that that speed is being used to serve power rather than undermine it. I think this was the point of Death Grips is Online: to say that the radical proliferation of entertainment, ideas, images and online-people might seem like fun, or like a positive, fast-moving, progressive force, but is actually just a way to reveal yourself to whatever is currently in power. They say something, you say it back and post a photo, and then you are valued by them recognising that photo. You have not given yourself away because you have shared any information, you have given yourself away, in part, because you acted at all. The point I want to make is more subtle than saying that Death Grips are against Facebook-and-Google style information harvesting: the point is that your creativity, at any speed (and I use the word creativity in the sense of meaning any action that is unpredictable or which is up to you), is always going to be funnelled in a way that props up something else. It isn’t actually radical energy, it’s weighed over by something more sinister which reduces it.

This is why Death Grips were actually retweeting stuff rather than just making a meme. They were playing the role of the man in power by putting themselves in control of everyone else’s creativity even when it seemed like it was all fun and games. So the act of hierarchising information just by presenting it was the sinister point they were trying to make. When you post something you are snitching about yourself, and it doesn’t go into a void, it goes straight to the Powers that B, not necessarily by the process of them gathering information about you, but because you don’t realise that you are being harnessed, or that your energy is going nowhere, or that it only has value in recognition. The point obviously isn’t being made about the memes or about being derivative, it’s being made, a little ironically, about Death Grips’ art vs everyone else’s “art”, where I’m taking “art” to mean, like Delillo, a disruptive or disturbing expression, and where power can be taken to mean anything as general as a thing outside of yourself. It doesn’t have to mean a shadowy government, it can be something a lot more common than that. When you give yourself away, when you snitch yourself to the powers, anything you think you can do which is outside a process which is helpful or systematizable is actually nullified because of the platform that it’s on. Or even more generally, it is easy to forget, say Death Grips, just how encapsulating the various powers which reduce your radical energy are. There is probably something to be said for how MC Ride obscures his own words here- none of us can get a read on him, he doesn’t speak in interviews, he doesn’t snitch on who Stefan Burnett is.

So by calling you a snitch Death Grips are endorsing a more radical, less noticed, more individuated kind of personal existence, one in which your “art” (and it can be anything) is important because it’s weird, or not systematizable. Even when you think you have noticed the game- that Death Grips are retweeting you because you said something which they told you to say- your produce is still only being valued by you because it’s being recognised by that power. You laugh, they laugh, then you laugh again, then they have stopped laughing.

So the libertarian leanings of Death Grips are back, here, because they are insisting on the importance of having your own individuality, of keeping to yourself because doing anything else (like in the novels of D.H. Lawrence) is to give yourself away, and it’s the year of the snitch because Death Grips, as an internet band, are realising what is happening to the internet- again, not in a data-harvesting sense, more in a sense of where the internet, and the creative forces of the internet, are being directed, not necessarily just to nullify them, but definitely to funnel those forces, or to put a roof over their head, to stop them from being radical ever.

So ultimately I think this is an interesting move because it’s anti-internet, or at least because it runs against the idea of information as positive. A lot of theory- posthuman, postcolonial, avant-garde- reacts to the overwhelming proliferation of information, of art, of things, by formulating a kind of inherently bewildered system which deals with open arms with what is high, what is low, anything that is made, and sees old theory as bourgeois and inadequate for having not seen how much there really is: and in turn systems of acceptance are built up to incorporate works of art or systems of art which act like webs: the terms “collage”, “fragmentation”, “imagism”, even “inclusivity” (I mean this last one in a strictly aesthetic way). But what Death Grips is doing here is wary of big systems in a beautifully hip-hop way: a new movement into hating snitches, as might just be obvious by the use of the term, actually shows them as having more in common with 90s rap than the avant-garde, because it shows an importance in the wariness (the bewariness?) of the individual over the open-arms collective, over the dispersal of activity.



If that seems like a lot to read in to a couple of phrases and an album title then I’d just end by saying that a lot of these themes have been around in Death Grips for a while: “You’re a shiny clown to me / and the powers that B” already insists on hiding yourself away, as if the act of insisting above the symbolic “Deep Web” is already an act of being laughed at by a power above you. The situation of ownership might be more dire, it might be a passive situation, even an automatic one now.