Anne Bonny

The Legend at the Edge of Law

In the autumn of 2013, Death Grips dropped Government Plates with no announcement, no press cycle, no tour, no interviews. The album appeared on their Facebook page alongside music videos for every track: a completed artifact left at the door with no explanation.^[1] The second track, "Anne Bonny," takes its name from one of history's most famous pirates, a woman who lived and died by radical defiance of the very concept of legitimate authority. It was a fitting choice for a band that had just torched its own major label contract the year before.

Free of Everything: The 2013 Context

By the time Government Plates arrived, Death Grips had already written their own mythology in the most confrontational terms possible. After signing to Epic Records and releasing The Money Store to widespread critical acclaim in 2012,^[3] they promptly leaked their follow-up album No Love Deep Web in breach of contract, distributing it free via BitTorrent with their manager's phone number printed on the cover. Epic dropped them. Death Grips had essentially dared the label to fire them, and claimed the firing as a statement.^[3]

Government Plates was their first full release on Third Worlds, their own imprint formed in mid-2013 in loose partnership with Harvest/Capitol Records.^[1] That arrangement was characteristically slippery: institutional enough to secure distribution, independent enough to avoid accountability. The band also became notorious that summer for a pattern of canceled shows and deliberate non-appearances, culminating in a Lollapalooza afterparty where fans arrived to find only a pre-recorded backing track playing alongside a large printout of a fan's suicide note. Death Grips called it a performance. The audience destroyed the equipment.^[3]

All of this is the frame for "Anne Bonny," a track that functions less as a conventional song and more as a statement of kinship with a particular kind of outlaw.

The Pirate as Mirror

Anne Bonny was, by historical consensus, one of the most remarkable figures of the Golden Age of Piracy. Born in Ireland around 1698, she eventually made her way to the Caribbean, where she left her husband for the pirate captain John "Calico Jack" Rackham and joined his crew, disguising herself as a man in order to fight alongside them.^[2] Her active piracy career lasted roughly 61 days, from the summer of 1720 until the crew's capture that October. What followed was a trial, a death sentence, and a reprieve after she claimed pregnancy. Her ultimate fate remains uncertain.^[2]

What endures is the image: a woman who dressed as a man, carried weapons, participated in raids, and operated entirely outside the permission of any legitimate authority. Death Grips' invocation of this figure is not accidental. The band has consistently drawn on historical and mythological icons of transgression and institutional defiance. Their debut mixtape Exmilitary opened with a sample of Charles Manson's voice, establishing an early preoccupation with American cult mythology and institutional violence that would resurface across the band's career.^[3]

Anne Bonny is different in kind from that fixation, though. Where Manson represents manipulation and cult dynamics, Bonny represents a more elemental form of freedom: physical, embodied, enacted on the open sea. She is pre-institutional, operating in the spaces between empires, subject to no nation's law. The appeal to Death Grips is legible. This is a band that has spent its entire career finding ways to exist in the gaps between institutional structures, using them for distribution and then abandoning or sabotaging them before being fully captured.

Surveillance, Identity, and the Government Plates Frame

The album title matters here. "Government Plates" refers to license plates issued to government vehicles: the observation infrastructure of the state, the machinery of tracking and accountability, turned around to conceal itself from scrutiny.^[1] The album arrived in 2013, the same year that Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA's mass surveillance apparatus shocked the public and made institutional monitoring a central topic of cultural conversation. Whether or not Death Grips were directly responding to those disclosures, the record sits squarely inside that moment: a sustained inquiry into who watches whom, who is tracked, who evades, and what that evasion costs.

Anne Bonny was, in the most literal sense, a person who evaded government surveillance. She moved between jurisdictions, disguised her identity by suppressing her gender, and operated outside the registry of legitimate subjects entirely. In the context of Government Plates, naming a track after her is an act of historical citation: here is someone who found a way to be ungovernable before the surveillance state had its current form, and who paid the price but refused to disappear from history.

The song's sonic character reinforces this theme. Like much of Government Plates, the track features MC Ride's vocals in a more fragmented, percussive role. Rather than the sustained lyrical assault of The Money Store, his voice becomes another instrument in the industrial mix, phrases looped and layered until the words begin to lose their referential function and become texture. The instrumentals, built by Zach Hill and Andy Morin, pile dense churning electronics over Hill's characteristically chaotic drumming. There is no resolution in the music. It sustains tension rather than releasing it.

Gender, Embodiment, and the Violence Beneath

One dimension of the Anne Bonny citation that deserves attention is the gender transgression she represents. She did not observe the rules governing women's lives in the early 18th century, and she did so in the most physically committed way available to her: by taking up arms, wearing men's clothing, and placing herself inside a male-coded space of violence.^[2]

Death Grips has never been a band concerned with easy or uncomplicated masculinity. MC Ride's persona sits at the intersection of vulnerability and aggression in ways that resist straightforward reading. The invocation of Anne Bonny, a woman performing maleness inside a hypermasculine context of piracy and violence, adds another layer to a band that has always been interested in destabilizing the categories that appear most settled. She is not reduced to symbolism here. She is named, and her name carries the weight of a real historical life.

Alternative Readings

Not every listener approaches this track through the lens of piracy history, and that is appropriate. On a purely sonic level, "Anne Bonny" functions as a relentless piece of industrial music that rewards listening primarily through its texture and momentum. The name may work as pure atmosphere: a historical proper noun that evokes wildness, the sea, danger, and freedom without requiring any engagement with the historical record at all.

There is also a reading in which the song is primarily about Death Grips themselves: the band that escaped their label, defied their industry, canceled their shows, and declared themselves over on a napkin in July 2014,^[3] all while continuing to make and release music. In that framing, Anne Bonny is an analog for their own career: brief in its most transgressive phase, murky in its ultimate conclusion, but impossible to forget. The name sticks because the act was real.

The Song's Place in the Catalog

Government Plates received broadly positive critical reception, earning Pitchfork's Best New Music designation^[4] and a Metacritic aggregate of 75/100.^[1] Some critics found the reduced vocal presence from MC Ride a departure that diluted the band's impact compared to their earlier work,^[5] while others read it as a deliberate and interesting evolution toward abstraction. "Anne Bonny" sits near the top of the tracklist as one of the album's more immediately striking statements, its density front-loading the record with the full weight of the band's industrial sound.

Within Death Grips' catalog on this site, the album's title track also explores the themes of institutional evasion and anti-surveillance that run through the record. "Anne Bonny" personalizes that evasion by attaching it to a human face and a name that comes pre-loaded with centuries of historical resonance.

Conclusion: The Ungovernable

What makes "Anne Bonny" compelling is not any single element but the coherence of the gesture. Death Grips in 2013 were a band who had successfully burned their major label deal, who were antagonizing audiences with deliberate non-appearances, who were releasing music on their own terms with no announcement and no explanation. In that context, naming a track after a woman who spent 61 days operating entirely outside the law, who dressed as a man to fight among pirates, and who refused to disappear from history despite a death sentence,^[2] is not random. It is a statement of affiliation.

The Golden Age of Piracy was, among other things, an experiment in what happens when people refuse the terms of organized society. Death Grips, functioning within a different kind of power structure but applying similar energy, found a patron saint in it.

"Anne Bonny" is the sound of that recognition.