Is Death Grips this Era's Rage Against the Machine?

 ^{[citation needed]} Apart from the heightened requirements for being considered legit anti-corporate and the fact that Death Grips isn't that political, it almost seems possible. Time moves in cycles, and it has been a while since there was a Rage Against The Machine-esque group in or near the mainstream, that I know of, but Death Grips seem to be the perfect candidate. Behind the facade, they don't even have coherent words to get an agenda from... actually this whole thing is falling apart: the new Rage would obviously be a New Sincerity band.

However, I get this sense from Death Grips that they're projecting an even bigger identity than what they actually possess. It's like how Rage was part of the 'Che Guevara T-Shirt era' of counterculture, a largely corporate construction referencing or alluding to deep things like a Tibetan monk on fire or how bad racism was. Death Grips is the new counterculture, which may be more legit, but has even less coherence.

As far as I know only Death Grip's tendency to release their albums for free is solidly anti-corporate or at all activist, and they don't really project any leftism or rightism in their lyrics at all. They more exist in a great, drugged out realm where politics can't claim them for its own insidious purpose. The idea that they are not just dudes making music, and instead dudes getting paid a lot to make music for some kind of viral marketing project, is very tempting mostly because I'm a hugely cynical skeptic.

The machine has won. Rage was one of its products and the crowd that used to listen to them sincerely have all moved on, mostly towards being yuppies. Death Grips exists in the absence of hope or progress, an aesthetic the group wallows in, as if to prove there is nothing left – a statement powerful enough to put it on equal footing with the largest, least counterculture countercultural movement of the 1990s.

It all relies on the idea that maybe Death Grips is saying something by screaming incoherently about drugs and paranoia and lust, but I know for a fact the group's listeners do not wear Che Guevara shirts. I have my ideas about their fans, in particular I think a lot of them are anything but as hardcore and mentally unsound as the music suggests, and the music writes a bigger cheque than Rage ever did because it seems to mostly be balls-out insanity.

Note that both groups were signed to Epic Records Co. Death Grips is no longer with them due to self-releasing albums and other rebellious things that Rage never did at all. Rage did manage to get a very comprehensive listing as 'questionable music' in the wake of 9/11, when any actual radical had not listened to them for nearly a decade. Ultimately very idea of counterculture 1990s is either very scary or incredibly laughable so I would put the two groups in different categories at least temporarily. I don't think the distinction would help either band and to be honest I don't think they have anything in common at all.

However: this does not mean that Death Grips is not this era's Rage Against the Machine. Epic Records execs must have seen the same underground/indie/counterculture buzz in both bands in order to want to sign them. Nobody cares that much about either band right now, but Death Grips is alive at least. Death Grips did not get the over-mainstream cool people and instead nabbed the indie nerds who are too cool and self-aware for horrorcore but into something similar, to the eternal chagrin of the Execs, who then dumped DG after finding or making a suitable excuse. I know they were part of the corporate overlords' plans somehow. Just like Rage. More the fools us.^{[citation needed]}