I've Seen Footage

"I've Seen Footage" is a track off of Death Grip's (comprised of vocalist MC Ride and drummer Zac Hill and keyboardist Andy Morin) first studio album The Money Store. The song is a collection of thoughts and observations that give cryptic details about the speaker's (MC Ride) troubled life and how it has ultimately left him paranoid and numb to violence and suffering. The song begins with the lines "Get up/Beats bout waist deep/Swallowed by beats" which refers to how Ride feels consumed by the music that he makes. The experience of making and listening to music is cathartic and an escape from the deep thought that he is susceptible to. The way the song progresses from this point suggests that the lyrics may be just be taken from a single train of thought. Beginning where Ride feels most comfortable, gradually his paranoia builds until it overcomes him and draws him out of this musical boundary that he has formed around himself.

The next lines, "What's that/Can't tell/ Handheld dream/Shot in hell/Deep space ghetto streets/Show me something/I ain't seen before" are where his paranoia and memory kicks in. He senses a presence and cannot pinpoint it, but it triggers something in his mind. He starts to recall parts of his life like it's footage "shot in hell". The violent nature of his upbringing in the ghetto has deeply disturbed him and as he reviews this violence, he asks to be shown something he hasn't seen before. This allegory continues throughout the song as he runs through his life from a removed perspective as if it were footage (hence the title).

Later, the paranoia continues when he says, "Creeps up behind me/Over my shoulder/Turn around try to see/But it's nowhere/Noided, noided/Static on my blindside." He senses the presence return, but he doesn't have time to catch a glimpse. In other words, he's still "noided" or paranoid, and somethings preventing him from having total recall of his past, it's too staticky. After these lines, the chorus burst in with Ride simply repeating "I've seen footage/I stay noided." These words are Ride remarking, to himself, on all of the horrible things he's seen.

Ride then spends the next few stanzas talking about his fear of other people viewing this life footage the same way he is. He mentions the feeling that satellites are monitoring him and not being able to shake the feeling of other people following him. He just wishes that he could "delete" the footage, because he feels that he is prisoner to it.

The final section of the song is Ride describing disturbing footage that he has stumbled upon on the internet and how it fails to really make him feel anything. The first video is described, "Armored cop open fire Glock/On some kid who stepped so/Fast was hard to grasp/What even happened til you seen dat head blow/Off his shoulders in slow mo/Rewind that, is so cold/Rewind that, is so cold." These lines are at the same time a politically charged statement against police brutality, and a condemnation of himself for not being moved by the unsettling content. He continues to talk about two other videos, one of a child soldier shooting someone and another of a horrific car crash. His lack of emotion doesn't imply a total lack of sympathy. He does comment that watching the other footage makes "his jaw drop", but again, he's lived it so it's not making his eyes well up.

Though the loud and abrasive style of this song might suggest that the content is mindless babble, it's really a very powerful an brutally honest assessment of life and society. There's no frilly language or extravagant wordplay, but if there were, it would detract from the message.

Here's a link to the song since it didn't seem to make it on the playlist. And here's the lyrics because it's hard to understand what he's saying.