Searching for the Death Grips movie
Dear Bottomless Pit,
I need you here to undo me. I wake up in a deep search for intent and belief in myself, but the day is intense and driven with some euphoria. I’m thinking now—I’ve never been bored until this moment, and this moment is gone. Forever.
I’ve spent the last hour or so trying to come up with a way to introduce the above words and failing at every possible turn. When it comes to an artistic ethos so enigmatic and singular as the one behind those lines, it’s often best just to let them stand alone.
That passage comes courtesy of Zach Hill, drummer and key creative force behind Sacramento-based experimental rap trio Death Grips. They’re not lyrics, though — it’s not entirely clear which member(s) of the group writes those — but dialogue from a never-produced film.
A brief introduction for those unfamiliar: Death Grips are a musical project known for their incredibly abrasive sound, alienating and paranoid lyrics, punk antics (whether it be leaking their second album for free online or slapping a picture of Hill’s erect penis on that album’s cover), and unfathomably dedicated fanbase. Long story short, if Death Grips fans haven’t really uncovered anything of substance about this unmade film, I will certainly not be able to.
What little there is about this film comes from the announcement of their fifth album, Bottomless Pit, alongside of which was released a nearly fifteen minute video of the same name featuring late Hollywood actress Karen Black reciting lines from a screenplay we’re told was written by Hill himself.
As you could probably gauge from this article’s opening, the lines in question aren’t exactly Kaufman and Hart. Death Grips are renowned for their dense, disturbing, and fundamentally violent lyrics that repulse as readily as they intrigue. While the video doesn’t contain imagery quite as off-putting as Death Grips vocalist MC Ride is liable to deliver (“I fuck the music / I make it cum / I fuck the music with my serpent tongue”), it does mix verbal puzzles like “I am God yes hello I will practice you” with gems like “like Egyptians fucking the crocodiles, that’s my mind now too” and “I will fuck your mind and steal the babies”
In the video, Black is relatively motionless and remains supine throughout, yet still delivers a remarkably stirring performance all things considered. As hundreds of YouTube comments will point out, it’s almost impossible to tell when Black is performing and when she isn’t. Her sincerity is rarely in question throughout the duration of the video, and the offhandedness with which she delivers some of the script’s more unsettling lines shows the marks of an actor still at the top of her game.
Aside from the video and a tepidly-worded press release, though, all leads on Hill’s unrealized project go quite cold. It was announced that Death Grips would provide an original soundtrack for the film, and many Grips-obsessed Redditors are convinced that their third album, Government Plates, was to be the such a soundtrack. Whether this is the case is not really possible to tell, as Government Plates is just as ostensibly film-unfriendly as the rest of their music.
Possibly the only new bit of information I have to add to this saga comes from a Reddit AMA in which Robert Pattinson explained the provenance of a somewhat absurd photo he took with the group and Beyoncé. During his explanation, he mentions that he and Death Grips were originally going to do a video together and then “almost started doing a movie.” The only tangible thing that seems to have resulted from this collaboration is a Pattinson-played guitar riff appearing on “Birds,” a song from Government Plates.
Whether this movie was the same one that Karen Black was to have a role in we might never know. I don’t think anyone expects additional information about this film to be released any time in the foreseeable future. Death Grips matches the unparalleled aggression in their music with extreme insularity in all other ways — a since-deleted Pitchfork interview is just about as open to the public as the band has ever been.
That is, if you don’t count the Bottomless Pit video. Black’s monologue is introduced and followed by text of remarkable tenderness, expressing deep regret at Black’s passing. The editing is minimal and imagery sparse (by Death Grips standards, at least). The group’s music, while politically uninvolved, relentlessly expresses discontent at the broad state of things. We don’t know in what way, but Death Grips wish the world was different.
Much of the hatred and isolation normally in their lyrics is on display in the video, yes, but in a subtly different way. Hill has taken subjects normally delivered in the alarmingly belt of MC Ride and transposed it for a woman in her mid-70s. What, in the voice of Ride, sounds like an assault sounds like a meditation from Black. She died just months after the video was recorded, making lines like “eternity is just okay” hit in ways they likely couldn’t otherwise.
As we get older, discontent can turn into a lot of things: apathy, sorrow, regret. Death Grips and their anger are very of the moment — their fixation on industrial sounds and digital themes closely mirrors the fractured landscape of the strange combination of broken physical environments and dangerous online worlds many of us live in.
What the Bottomless Pit video seems to ask, if anything, is what to do with that anger once it’s all too late — screaming about death doesn’t necessarily make it any easier. Through the conduit of Karen Black and her furtive, dynamic voice, we learn that Death Grips know this. And they’re as unsure about it as we are.
