"Body & Blood" by clipping. Is A Health Goth Sex Jam
Drumming Upstream #2
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream, a series in which I learn how to play every song I’ve Liked on Spotify on drums in chronological order and write about each of them.
Now onto “Body & Blood” by the noise rap trio clipping.
Side A
“Body & Blood”
By clipping.
CLPPNG
Released June 10th, 2014
Liked on June 23rd, 2014
f you asked me in 2014, when I first Liked “Body & Blood” on Spotify, to name the three best anime TV shows according entirely to my personal preferences, I would have told you in order: Neon Genesis Evangelion, Paranoia Agent, and most pertinently to the matter at hand, Serial Experiments Lain.1
Serial Experiments Lain, originally broadcast in 1998, is a 13 episode paranoid freakout about the post-human possibilities of the nascent world wide web, in which a teenage girl gradually merges with her computer, physically and metaphysically, after receiving an email from her dead-by-suicide classmate. It’s weird as hell. The plot barely grazed the highest strands of my hair the first time I watched it, but Serial Experiments Lain’s arsenal of late 90s near-future aesthetic ephemera hit me right between the eyes. Serial Experiments Lain is terrified of technology, but can’t help but make everything about its now-dated vision of the future look really cool. Even the archaic speech-synthesis voice that announces each episode title comes across as menacing and otherworldly, an impression that I haven’t been able to shake from the sound ever since.
When I heard a similar voice echoing over “Body & Blood”’s pile driver of a chorus, I immediately pulled my phone out of my pocket and pressed my thumb all over Spotify’s heart icon. The song’s verse had already intrigued me. I had checked out clipping. on the suggestion that they were halfway between industrial and hip-hop, and Daveed Diggs rapping about a goth seductress over a distorted kick drum already delivered on that promise. But when Diggs started trading lines with the monotonous baritone of Satan’s MacBook I tipped over from intrigued to elated. clipping. weren’t just making challenging, genre-bending music, they were also having fun. Of course as the sharper eared readers may have noticed by now, the voice on the chorus of “Body & Blood” is not the same as the PlainText whisper from Serial Experiments Lain, even if it evokes the same eerie, post-human feeling. In reality clipping. sampled this voice from the track “Shrine” by the power electronics musician Deathpile. This indicates that the song has less to do with aesthetics of late 1990s cyberpunk and more to do with the trends of the mid 2010s. Allow me to explain why.
“Body & Blood” is the second track on clipping.’s self-titled sophomore album, rendered in the SEO-friendly, vowelless parlance of the era as CLPPNG. CLPPNG arrived in the summer of 2014 dressed head to toe in black leather and latex to strut down a blood red carpet laid by half a decade of increased interest in the overlap between hip-hop and harsher forms of electronic music. By 2014, Death Grips had risen from indie sensation to major label self-immolation, and Kanye West was a year into touring arenas to promote Yeezus, the noisiest and as of yet least audience friendly album of his career. Even rappers that didn’t sound particularly industrial were dressing like cast members of Blade, thanks to the popularization of Hood By Air, Raf Simons, and Rick Owens by acts like A$AP Rocky. Club kids had GHE20G0TH1K and gym rats had #HealthGoth. clipping. looked like the next surfers in line to hang ten off the darkwave into the hearts of rap fans across America.
These days clipping. look like something quite different. These days, Daveed Diggs is most well known for his Tony award winning performance as Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton. Diggs produced, wrote, and starred in Blindspotting, a charming quasi-musical about race and police violence in gentrified Oakland that doesn’t make any statements too radical to scare off centrist Democrats. He’s apparently in the American TV version of Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer, which I only ever hear about in commercials during basketball games. In short, clipping. now look like an NPR-friendly nerd rap project featuring a beloved thespian. Which version of clipping. you think is the “real” one depends entirely on your point of view. The truth is that both visions are equally accurate. clipping.’s producers Jonathan Snipes and William Hutson are real deal noise dudes. Daveed Diggs is a musical theater guy through and through. The tension between those two worlds, and their intersection in hip-hop, a genre defined by its groundbreaking approach to sound design with a long history of narrative storytelling, is part of what makes clipping. so compelling.
From what I’ve gathered by listening to interviews with clipping., Diggs, Hutson and Snipes write their songs from the top down. What this means is that instead of starting their songs around a set of lyrics or presenting a finished beat for Diggs to write to, the trio come up with a theme and then write all of their music toward expressing that theme. This is why the form and the function of so many clipping. songs move in perfect synch. It’s a style of writing that risks heavy-handedness when the starting premise isn’t strong enough, but when clipping. find the right idea to bring to life that same heavy hand can grab you by the throat. Case in point: “Body & Blood.” The song takes the edgy sex-murder premise of the Deathpile song it sampled and it flips it across the gender binary. Over three verses an unnamed female protagonist drugs, tortures and murders “more than a few” men lured in by her mind-boggling hotness. From line to line, Diggs jumps back and forth in time, describing the slack jawed men ogling their killer at the club in one moment and then cutting forward in time to list the tools of their grisly end. The irony of the situation reaches a fever pitch in the chorus when Diggs urges our heroine to “twerk something, girl” while drills whirr against a booming four-on-the-floor dance beat.
We can assume that clipping. started from the premise of “woman uses sex appeal to murder” and wrote the music as the setting. The song sounds like it should be played at an industrial club because that’s where she finds her victims. If you were only half paying attention to the song, say the level of attention necessary to confuse Deathpile with Serial Experiments Lain, you might think that the song is about a dominatrix. Risque and kinky, to be sure, but nothing really dangerous. The dance beat is a ruse, bait for fun seeking black-shirted bros like me. It isn’t until much later, in my case years later, when you notice lyrics about severed heads and revving chainsaws that you realize you are in serious trouble. By then she, and by proxy clipping., already have you.
Now let’s take a look at that beat.
Side B
“Body & Blood”
Produced by William Hutson & Jonathan Snipes
102 BPM
Only two entries into Drumming Upstream and we’ve already reached our first existential riddle. There are no drums on “Body & Blood”. And yet there is a drum beat. What gives? And what’s a drummer to do if they want to learn how to play the song? Luckily Snipes & Hutson programmed a beat that resembles a part that a drummer might play. There’s a kick drum, a snare, and some hi-hats. But if you swapped out this programmed beat for a live drummer playing on an acoustic kit, the result would sound nothing like “Body & Blood”. The distortion on the kick drum stretches out its attack into a crackling decay. An acoustic kick, no matter how loud, would sound empty by comparison. A “real” snare would, on the other hand, sound too well defined compared the sizzling hiss of its digital counterpart. As for the hi-hats, I ask which ones? There are at least two layers of hi-hats through out the track, playing patterns that no two-armed human could ever replicate.
Thankfully my goal isn’t to replace the drummers of these songs but to learn from them. Despite not picking up a pair of sticks once during the tracking of “Body & Blood,” Snipes & Hutson are for all intents and purposes the drummers on this song. They keep and organize the time, mark changes in the form through additions to the beat, and give Diggs’ lightning-quick lyrics a center of gravity to revolve around. And there is plenty to learn from playing what the duo wrote for this song.
The first thing I noticed about the drums is that there’s almost no syncopation. Until the final chorus everything important lands precisely on the song’s downbeats. This isn’t that common in rap music, generally you’ll hear emphasis on off-beats to give the groove more bounce, but it is very common in the club-ready industrial that clipping. are aiming for on this song. You’d think that this strict adherence to the downbeats would limit Snipes & Hutson’s options, but the two get a lot of mileage out of these rules. Each section of the song uses a slightly different combination of its three ingredients so that no two parts are exactly the same. First it’s kick drum only. Then snare but only on beat two. Then a full on back beat. Finally in the last chorus clipping. add an offbeat on the snare every other measure. Nothing about this is particularly complicated or flashy, but the attention to detail goes a long way. I never noticed how subtly this groove changes over time, and I’m certain that it contributes to the song’s listenability. These little changes keep the ears engaged even when the conscious mind doesn’t catch them.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
Now with two songs under our belt we can get this section up and running for real. Which song do I like more, Springsteen’s “Bobby Jean” or clipping.’s “Body & Blood”? “Body & Blood” is closer to my general aesthetic preference for distortion and raw volume. It’s the song I’d rather dance to and the song, musically at least, that I’d be more likely to write if left to my own devices. And yet, I must give the edge to “Bobby Jean” for reasons sentimental. I like Daveed Diggs’ lyrics for “Body & Blood”, and I especially like the idea of blasting them onto unsuspecting Hamilton fans, but I LOVE Springsteen’s lyrics on “Bobby Jean”. For two weeks in a row, Springsteen remains the boss of Drumming Upstream:
“Bobby Jean” by Bruce Springsteen
“Body & Blood” by clipping.
Can Springsteen hold onto the number one spot for three weeks in a row? Only one way to find out!
If you asked me that question now, I would not include Serial Experiments Lain. Hell even if you had asked me a year later I would not have included it solely on the basis of having seen Madoka Magica by that point.