Beware

The song does not begin with music. It begins with a voice. Before Death Grips have struck a single note of their own, a man is speaking calmly about money, control, and the performance of power. Listeners who recognize the voice feel the temperature drop immediately. Those who do not recognize it feel something stranger: an uncanny familiarity, the sensation of hearing a logic they know from somewhere, delivered by a speaker they cannot quite place. That voice belongs to Charles Manson,^[2] and the question of why Death Grips chose to open their debut record with it is the question the entire song is built around.

Sacramento, December 2010

Death Grips officially formed on December 21, 2010, in Sacramento, California. On that same day, they recorded their first song.^[1] Within months, they had completed Exmilitary, a thirteen-track mixtape released as a free download on April 25, 2011. The speed of its creation was not incidental. It reflected a band working at the velocity of an idea that had been waiting to happen.

The trio consists of Stefan Burnett (MC Ride) on vocals, Zach Hill on drums and production, and Andy Morin on keyboards and sound design. Hill, already known for his work with the math-rock duo Hella, described the formation of Death Grips as a return to focused creative energy: a deliberate narrowing of his artistic output into a single, concentrated channel.^[3] Burnett had been his neighbor.

Before Death Grips, Burnett had studied visual arts at Hampton University in Virginia, dropped out, and returned to Sacramento, where he worked service jobs while developing his parallel careers as a rapper and a painter.^[9] He had performed in a hip-hop group called Fyre under the name Mxlplx. His lyrical universe, by the time Death Grips convened, was already fully formed: sex, drugs, addiction, economic collapse, insanity, suicide, occultism, and paranoia. On "Beware," he deploys all of it.

Sacramento itself was not incidental to what Death Grips were making. The city serves throughout Exmilitary as a backdrop and a subject. Drowned in Sound's John Calvert described the album's portrait of the city as that of "a sleek totalitarian police state" rooted in Sacramento's identity as the California state capital: an administered, politically conservative environment shaped by proximity to government power.^[5] In that context, the rage that saturates "Beware" is not merely psychological. It is also spatial and political.

What the Samples Are Doing

"Beware" uses three sampled sources. The Manson excerpt functions as a prologue. Beneath MC Ride's vocals runs a heavily processed loop drawn from "Up the Beach" by Jane's Addiction, a piece of ambient noise and atmospheric guitar. A third sample, from a recording by Dickie Burton, weaves through the track's mid-section.^[7] The decision not to clear any of these samples meant the album was later pulled from streaming platforms,^[1] a fact that feels in retrospect almost programmatic. Death Grips were not operating within the music industry's terms; they were using its raw material without asking permission.

The Manson sample is the most charged of the three. The speech it draws from features Manson speaking about money and self-determination in terms that are, if you strip away the speaker, almost recognizable as a distorted form of American entrepreneurial rhetoric: the individual as the sole arbiter of his own value and fate. Death Grips do not invoke Manson here to celebrate him or to align themselves with his ideology. They invoke him to expose a continuity. The logic of absolute self-assertion, the refusal of social contract, the performance of power as its own justification, these are not unique to monsters. They run through the mainstream culture as well. The Manson sample makes that visible by pressing an extreme example against a familiar frame.

The Jane's Addiction sample operates differently. "Up the Beach" is a desolate, drifting piece, more texture than composition. Zach Hill and Andy Morin grind it into something harder and more relentless, transforming atmospheric source material into a kind of engine. The effect is of a recognizable genre aesthetic, post-punk noise rock, being consumed and reconstituted at a higher temperature. The result sounds like something eating itself.

The Narrator's Descent

The lyrical arc of "Beware" traces an unnamed figure abandoning the constraints of conventional human behavior and moving through a sequence of transgressive states: violence, spiritual corruption, greed, and a kind of ecstatic nihilism. The song does not frame this as a moral fall in any traditional sense. It frames it as a transformation, something between a horror story and a liberation narrative, without resolving the tension between those two readings.

MC Ride's vocal performance is the instrument that makes this ambiguity live. His approach has been described as combining elements of hardcore punk and spoken word with a hip-hop foundation,^[9] but on "Beware" those descriptions feel clinical against the reality of the performance. He moves between registers at speed, shifting from low-pitched narration to screaming in the same passage, and the tonal variety makes the psychological content feel genuinely unstable rather than performed. This is not an actor playing a character. It is a voice inhabiting a state.

The lyrical content touches on territories that Burnett would return to across Death Grips' entire catalog: occultism, the seductive logic of power, the intersection of violence and desire, and the experience of existing at the extreme edges of social tolerance. But on "Beware," these themes arrive before the listener has any framework for understanding them. This is the opening track of the debut record. Everything that follows in the Death Grips catalog grows out of what is established here.

The Music Video and Its Landscape

The official video for "Beware" was released on July 14, 2011, directed by Flatlander, the collaborative alias used for Death Grips' visual work.^[4] It was shot in the California High Desert and features MC Ride moving through an environment of extreme heat and geological desolation. The FADER described the opening image as something between a man and a bird of prey perched above the landscape, a figure who has shed enough of the human to seem at home in the wilderness.

The video's visual arc moves from imagery that evokes something ancient and pre-civilizational toward the contemporary, tracking the moment when the beat drops in the song's structure. That movement from primitive to modern is the video's implicit argument: the energies the song invokes are not relics of a lost barbarism but living currents running through the present. The desert is not a metaphor for somewhere far from society. It is what society looks like from a sufficient remove.

Critical Reception and Cultural Impact

Exmilitary was received on release as an event record. Pitchfork's Nate Patrin gave it a 7.5 and called it "a bludgeoning slab of hostility" that managed to remain coherent despite its extremity.^[6] Drowned in Sound's Calvert gave it a 9, calling it "a significant entry in contemporary hip-hop" and praising its total commitment to "100 per cent anguish."^[5] Its free distribution model and early viral spread through music blogs represented one of the cleaner examples of underground experimental music achieving genuine cultural reach through purely grassroots digital means.

The long-term influence of what Death Grips built on Exmilitary has been extensively documented. Critics noted that Kanye West's Yeezus, released in 2013, bore the imprint of Death Grips' sonic experiments. David Bowie's collaborators confirmed that Bowie studied Death Grips closely while developing the palette of Blackstar, his final album.^[8] A Highsnobiety retrospective in 2018 asked plainly whether Death Grips had become the most important hip-hop act of the decade. The answer, for anyone who had traced the genre's subsequent development, was not seriously in question.^[8]

Alternative Readings

One influential reading of "Beware" frames it not as nihilism but as diagnosis. In this interpretation, the narrator's descent is not presented as a desirable state but as the logical end of conditions already present in the culture: the militarized surveillance of urban communities, the absence of economic mobility, the slow erosion of any social infrastructure that might offer alternatives to the logic of domination. The Manson sample, on this reading, is not provocative for its own sake. It is there to name a strain of American individualism that the culture refuses to recognize in its normalized, non-criminal forms.

Another reading takes the song's occult and satanic imagery at closer to face value, situating Death Grips within a tradition of transgressive American music that uses the symbolic vocabulary of forbidden belief systems not to endorse them but to weaponize their capacity to disturb. Black Sabbath did this. Bad Brains circled similar territory. The name Manson had been used as a provocation in rock music long before Death Grips arrived. What distinguishes the approach in "Beware" is the absence of any reassuring theatrical frame. The song does not put up quotation marks around its darkness. It refuses to signal that it is merely playing.

Death Grips have consistently declined to adjudicate between these interpretations. Their media presence across their career has been deliberately minimal, with Burnett describing himself as deeply distrustful of press, and the band as a whole refusing the explanatory interviews that might close down interpretive possibility.^[3] That refusal is itself a statement. The discomfort the listener feels in the absence of authorial reassurance is part of what the music is producing.

Why It Still Lands

"Beware" was recorded in a burst of creative intensity in late 2010 and early 2011, but the conditions it responds to have not changed. The surveillance infrastructure that Drowned in Sound's Calvert identified in Sacramento's civic landscape has expanded rather than contracted. The economic conditions that produce the kind of social rage Burnett channels have deepened. The logic of absolute self-assertion that the Manson sample exposes has grown more central rather than more marginal in American public life.

What the song offers is not comfort and not resolution. It offers recognition. For a listener who has felt the pressure of those conditions, hearing them processed into something this extreme and this formally coherent can function as a kind of release, the relief of encountering an art object that does not soften what it is describing. That release is not the same as endorsement. It is what happens when music takes seriously the emotional reality of experiences that the surrounding culture prefers to look away from.

As an opening statement, "Beware" is nearly complete in itself. It establishes the sonic vocabulary, the thematic territory, the refusal of reassurance, and the ambiguous moral register that would define everything Death Grips made afterward. The Manson voice at its beginning is still unnerving more than a decade later. It was designed to be. What it is unnerving about remains, as intended, the listener's problem to work out.