Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)

The Album's Last Word

Six minutes and thirty-eight seconds. That is how long Death Grips give themselves to say goodbye on Government Plates, and they use every second of it like a slow-moving threat. "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)" is the closing track of the band's third studio album, and it is simultaneously the most patient and most confrontational thing they had recorded to that point. It drones, it circles, it demands surrender. It doesn't explain itself. That refusal to explain is precisely the point.

Chaos as Context: Death Grips in 2013

To understand this song, you need to understand the state Death Grips were in when they made it. The year 2013 was, by any reasonable measure, the most turbulent of the band's career. In late 2012 they had sabotaged their relationship with Epic Records by leaking their own album, No Love Deep Web, as a free download without the label's permission. The provocative cover art ensured there would be no quiet resolution. Epic dropped them.^[2]

By mid-2013 they had formed their own imprint, Third Worlds, and were working on new material while simultaneously canceling booked shows without warning or apology. In August of that year, they failed to appear at a scheduled Lollapalooza aftershow in Chicago. Audience members, learning the band wasn't coming, destroyed the onstage equipment. Death Grips later characterized these cancellations as intentional artistic choices rather than logistical failures.^[2]

Then, on November 13, 2013, Government Plates appeared without warning: dropped across file-sharing sites and YouTube simultaneously, free, unannounced. No press cycle. No singles. Music videos for all eleven tracks uploaded at once. The entire album was a gesture before it was a listening experience, and that gesture was the same one the closing track would make explicit: we do whatever we want, and we don't care who's watching.^[1]

The Panopticon and Its Defiance

The album title alone carries enormous weight. Government license plates mark vehicles that can observe and operate freely, that move through public space with institutional authority while remaining outside ordinary accountability. The same month the album was recorded and finished, Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA mass surveillance were still reverberating through public discourse, having broken in June 2013.^[3] The anxiety about being watched, catalogued, and known by unseen institutional eyes was culturally live in a way it hadn't been before.

"Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)" names that anxiety directly and then refuses it. The song's title is its argument: the act of being observed is rendered irrelevant by the decision to proceed regardless. This is not a subtle metaphor. It is a statement that the band applied equally to government surveillance, to music industry oversight, to critics, and to the audience itself. The "who" in "Fuck Who's Watching" is deliberately unspecified. It covers everyone.^[3]

The Voice That Demands Surrender

The song opens with what is, structurally, a command. A voice -- calm, slow, unhurried -- issues an instruction to hand oneself over and remain calm, adding that it intends to take whatever it wants. This setup is genuinely and productively ambiguous.^[7]

Read one way, the speaker is the surveillance state: an impersonal institutional force demanding compliance while it extracts data, identity, and obedience from those it observes. The eerie calm of the delivery matches this reading well. Bureaucratic power rarely shouts.

Read another way, the speaker is Death Grips themselves: a band that has spent the preceding two years stealing their own work back from a label, canceling shows to provoke audiences, releasing albums on their own terms without asking anyone's permission. The declaration that they intend to take whatever they want reads as a perfectly accurate description of their career in 2013.^[2]

A third reading, darker and more existential, hears the voice as death itself. The language -- surrender, remain calm, an inevitable taking -- maps cleanly onto mortality. The song's slow crawl and trance-like repetition support this. It does not arrive with urgency. It has no need to.^[7]

Death Grips have never clarified which reading is correct, because the ambiguity is the point. The song functions as a Rorschach test for your particular anxieties about power.

Sound as Statement: The Sonic Architecture

Musically, the song is an outlier in the Death Grips catalog and in the context of the album itself. Where earlier Death Grips material thrived on aggression and velocity, "Whatever I Want" is slow, warped, and hypnotic. A New Age-inflected synthesizer loop forms the core of the track, drifting and repeating with the patience of something that knows it has all the time it needs.^[5]

MC Ride's voice appears less as a rapper and more as a haunting. Phrases recur and fade, reappear and dissolve. The standard Death Grips dynamic -- aggressive vocal delivery layered over abrasive production -- is stripped back into something more ambient, more unsettling precisely because the volume is turned down. The threat, such as it is, doesn't need to raise its voice.

At over six minutes, it is deliberately the band's longest track to that point, and that length is part of the meaning.^[1] The song refuses to end on anyone else's schedule. It closes the album the way a government vehicle closes a street: on its own authority, until it's done.

The Music Video and the Multimedia Album

Death Grips released a music video for every track on Government Plates simultaneously on release day, turning the album into an audiovisual experience from the first moment. Most of those videos feature abstract 3D animations on a black background. The video for "Whatever I Want" is one of only two that goes beyond this template, a distinction that underlines the song's status as the album's centerpiece statement.^[5]

The decision to pair every song with visual material from the start, without building to it, without singling out tracks for promotion, reinforced the album's anti-industry posture. There is no single. There is no lead track. There is only the whole thing, presented simultaneously, for free. The closing track's declaration that the band will take whatever it wants is inseparable from this context.

Where the Song Fits in the Larger Arc

Critical response to Government Plates ranged from enthusiastic to puzzled. Pitchfork gave it a Best New Music score of 8.4, calling it a record that provided "the power" and left listeners to supply their own political framework.^[4] Consequence of Sound was more ambivalent, finding the closing track repetitive and reading it as pure nihilism rather than complexity.^[3] Metacritic aggregated to 75/100.^[8]

Less than a year after the album's release, Death Grips announced they were breaking up while simultaneously leaking the first half of their next double album. The breakup proved to be either short-lived or false, and the band continued releasing music.^[2] Seen in retrospect, "Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)" reads almost prophetically: a band telling you they operate on their own logic, their own timeline, and that your expectations about what comes next are irrelevant.

The song's most honest meaning may be the most literal one. Death Grips, in 2013, had spent a year doing exactly whatever they wanted -- leaking albums, canceling shows, forming their own label, releasing records without warning -- and experiencing essentially no consequences that changed their behavior. The song is not a fantasy. It is a report.^[2]

Why It Still Resonates

The questions the song asks have not become less relevant. If anything, surveillance has expanded, institutional data collection has deepened, and the tension between individual expression and institutional observation has sharpened in the decade since Government Plates appeared. The song's title remains a kind of compressed philosophy: the only possible response to being watched at all times, by entities with more resources than you, is to proceed anyway.

There is something almost comforting in its slow insistence. The song is not angry. It is certain. Anger presupposes the possibility of a different outcome. Certainty does not bother with that negotiation. Death Grips had figured out, by the time they made this record, that the only way to deal with an apparatus of observation is to make observation irrelevant to your decisions.

"Whatever I Want (Fuck Who's Watching)" closes the album not with a bang but with a long, slow, unhurried insistence on itself. It doesn't need your approval. It wasn't asking.