Reinventing hip-hop

Zach Hill has his fingers in lots of stuff: Hella, Goon Moon, Team Sleep, Crom-Tech, et al. Every time he tries his hand at a different music style, it becomes relegated to the scope of the “musician follower,” the most esoteric kind of music fan.

Most of those acts go unnoticed (really, how many have you heard of?). This time, Hill and his group Death Grips try their collective hand at hip-hop, bringing Hill’s visceral, dissonant musical throughput to the genre paved with groove and slickness.

Will he succeed? Will hip-hop be the same as a result? Will Zach Hill rearrange the face of hip-hop as we know it?

As you may have guessed by the strength of the language, the answer is “yes.” The Money Store is a near-flawless record, a scathing reminder of the raw fury that hip-hop once wielded laced with undeniable genre-busting grooves.

The album, the second release from the Sacramento-based band, isn’t just one of the most innovative hip-hop records of the year—it’s one of the most innovative records in any genre. And while an abundance of artists sadly choose to eschew listenability in favor of innovation, Death Grips does not.

The Money Store is one of the only records I can remember that smashes genre boundaries to smithereens and rearranges them in a palatable fashion. In this hip-hop reconstruction, not a piece is out of place, not an element forgotten. They couldn’t have done it better.

The record begins with “Get Got,” and at the one-minute point, the listener can already recognize the bounds in maturity Death Grips has made since last year’s Exmilitary. Machine-like bursts of unaffected vocals peek through the dense layers of instrumentation laid down by Hill and company. The song, while not quite as jarring as Exmilitary opener “Beware,” is only slightly more subdued if not more disjointed.

“Get Got” beckons the listener into the catacombs of iconoclasm that lie beneath the surface of The Money Store. The utter genius of the track is that Death Grips uses it as a transition from what the listener knows about hip-hop into the chimera that is drummer Hill, programmer Andy Morin and frontman MC Ride.

Fans of Death Grips may notice that the group has done something very interesting: where Exmilitary covered most of the middle ground between traditional hip-hop and complete chaos without reaching either extreme, The Money Store is just the opposite.

The middle ground is completely erased, leaving the final product a harmonically rich crash-up of traditional hip-hop and complete sonic annihilation. Tracks like “Punk Weight” and “I’ve Seen Footage” capitalize on this nicely, with thick grooves laid down by Ride over whatever Hill thought sounded good that day.

Yes, there are even elements of the number-one genre people love to hate: dubstep. “System Blower” and “The Cage” would sound right at home on a giant club system if the production was a little cleaner. Such is the beauty of The Money Store: It’s too dark to play in a club but too raw not to blast at maximum levels. The line between utter noise and classic hip-hop is drawn, but it’s so thin you’d need an electron microscope to find it.

This isn’t to say that The Money Store ever veers into classic hip-hop territory enough to be mistaken for an Afrika Bambaataa record. By the end of the opus—compounded by the fact that the closing track, “Hacker,” is a real-deal electro-house track—you realize that the middle ground’s substance has been gnawed out from the inside.

The final fulcrum that keeps noise and hip-hop apart is forcibly removed by the final seconds of “Hacker,” sending experimental noise crashing down to the hip-hop bedrock below. Thus, the mission of The Money Store is complete. You have been indoctrinated. Spoiler alert: It feels damn good.

Of all the genres that exploded because of the Internet and the free sharing of information, techniques and exposure, hip-hop is perhaps the most stagnant of all. The genre was based on sampling (i.e. DJ Kool Herc’s Bronx shindigs of the 1970s) and has stayed relatively restricted. When acts surfaced that brought live instrumentation into the fold, that’s just about where hip-hop’s drastic mutations ended.

Luckily for future generations, artists like Death Grips push the envelope so far that it splits apart. The hip-hop bubble is broken, and the creative juices surrounding it have rushed inside hurriedly, bringing in all kinds of foreign agents.

As hip-hop was originally made for a certain group of people and evolved as a genre into music for everyone, so, too, has Death Grips stripped that back to a new generation of people that dare to shatter genres, plant the splinters and watch new trees grow. Welcome to The Money Store.