Death Grips Mashups

About

Death Grips Mashups are a series of song mashups which use audio stems of songs by the experimental hip-hop group Death Grips. Taken mostly from their mixtape Exmilitary, songs commonly used include “Takyon (Death Yon)”, “Lord of the Game”, and “I Want It I Need It (Death Heated)”. These mashups are commonly distributed on the audio sharing website SoundCloud as well as on YouTube, and have become a staple of the “SoundClown” genre.

Origin

Death Grips released their first mixtape, Exmilitary, on their website for free on April 25, 2011. On September 8, 2011, after releasing a teaser video, the group revealed Black Google, a release containing separated acapellas and musical stems for the tracks on Exmilitary, which was also released for free on their website. The release was published with the intent that the stems could be used for fan projects such as remixes.^[1]

Spread

One of the earliest mashups that used the Black Google acapellas was a mashup of “Culture Shock” with the song “$O$” by the South African hip-hop group Die Antwood, which was posted on September 30, 2011, and garnered over 10,000 listens on SoundCloud. Other notable mashups began to appear as early as 2012; examples of these include mashups with “Crank That Soulja Boy” and the opening theme to the anime Nichijou. On May 10, 2013, mashup artist Kolbush Mashups released the album Lift Yr Death Grips Like Guillotines to Heaven, which mashed up the Black Google stems with tracks from the album Lift Yr Skinny Fists like Antennas to Heaven by post-rock group Godspeed You! Black Emperor.^[2]

On June 10, YouTube user 超音波 released a mashup of “I Want It I Need It” with the Gorillaz hit “Feel Good Inc.”, which gained nearly 250,000 views. On August 3, SoundCloud user Steve Cox released a mash up of “Lord of the Game” with the Moon theme from the 1989 video game DuckTales, which was later discovered and reported by music news website Consequence of Sound.^[3] In early 2014, several Death Grips mashup albums were released under the moniker “Love Grips”; unlike many other Death Grips mashups, these albums used acapellas from the albums No Love Deep Web and Government Plates.^[4] On June 15, SoundCloud user theta released a mashup of “Lord of the Game” with the song “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー” by vaporwave artist Macintosh Plus, which was played over 270,000 on YouTube 80,000 times on SoundCloud. On January 26, 2015, mashup artist Triple-Q uploaded a mashup of the 2012 K-pop song “Gangnam Style” with “You Will Know Our Names” from the soundtrack to the video game Xenoblade Chronicles, which “featured” the acapella to “Takyon (Death Yon)”; this mashup garnered nearly 70,000 listens.