Diggs the speaker may not want us to dig—but Diggs the writer absolutely does.
In the opening lines of clipping.’s “Body for the Pile,” from their 2020 album Visions of Bodies Being Burned, listeners are treated to the surprising perspective of a spider lingering in the corner of a room that is also a murder scene: “and it’s stains in the wainscotting, cracks in the baseboard / arachnid in the corner serving up face like / ‘Whose house you think this is?’” Before we have even had the chance to absorb the lurid details that follow, our access to such information is challenged. The spider’s glaring presence puts us, as listeners, in a position of uncertainty: what right do we have to such details? What are the ethical implications of our witnessing the gruesome scene? In what ways does our observation make us complicit in what we see? clipping.’s music falls in the amorphous category of experimental hip hop; the sonic experience consists of herculean lyrical passages, often delivered by Daveed Diggs at breakneck pace, supported by ambient and glitch aesthetics provided by producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. Diggs’s thoughtfully explicit lyrics typically challenge the cultural fantasies and imaginative structures that order our social experience of the world. In keeping with such thematic and stylistic concerns, “Body for the Pile” is an exercise in cultivating listeners’ ambivalence, teasing us with graphic descriptions of horrid scenes even as it raises concerns over whether or not we should see what is placed before us. The track works by enticing listeners with the true-crime documentarian’s thrill of being somewhere they shouldn’t: behind the yellow tape.
In this respect, “Body for the Pile” is comparable to another clipping. track, “Polaroids,” from the group’s 2025 album Dead Channel Sky: the subject matter of both tracks are images. “Polaroids” details what appear to be photographs of people moments before their deaths, images the speaker claims are unimportant (“don’t nobody want these polaroids,” the refrain insists). Similarly, “Body for the Pile” presents a graphic depiction of crime scenes—specifically, the deaths of three police officers—such that the lyrics effectively double as crime scene photographs. Intensely focused on visual details, these two tracks distill lyricist Daveed Diggs’s hallmark descriptive style into a kind of obsessive ekphrasis, rendering images as verbal cascades. Despite the rigorous attention of each song’s speaker, however, the tracks leave listeners unsure whether they are getting the full picture—indeed, whether they should be getting the full picture. The ironic effect of Diggs’s lyrical arrangement and delivery is that listeners yearn to know more, even as they are instructed to desire otherwise. Despite the overload of information in Diggs’ hyperspeed rapping, the songs leave us with the impression that we have missed something, compelling us to listen again even as we question the propriety of doing so.
To this end, “Body for the Pile” and “Polaroids” straddle the troubled distinction between voyeurism and witnessing—between gratuitous gawking and the obligation to see the violence committed against marginalized groups as part of longer histories of sexual exploitation, racial subjugation, and class warfare. The tracks encourage us to reconcile the complicity of our 24/7, algorithm-driven, compulsive doomscrolling with the understanding that social media and online content also mediate our relationship with such histories. What I am calling the ekphrastic horrors of these two tracks are doubly disturbing: as descriptions that charge the listener with complicity for wanting to hear (or see) more, on one hand, and as descriptions that suggest we need to listen (or look) harder, to witness the histories submerged underneath these images, on the other. Mirroring the rhetorically strategic disinformation of clickbait headlines and social media newsflashes, clipping.’s tracks confront listeners with both the gratuitous desire to know more, to see the bodies for the pile, and with the limitations that constitute our mediated perception of atrocity: to see not the bodies for the pile but the forest for the trees, as it were.
The history we choose to study shapes our perception of the world today. When we repress specific histories, the present becomes opaque, dim, and imprecise. The ambiguous positionality of the listener in these tracks directs us to what Jed Esty calls the “history wars” of our volatile political moment, in which far-right policy advocates and legislators seem hellbent on whitewashing the atrocities, oppression, and racial violence of America’s past. On the cultural front, the music of clipping. is dedicated to resisting this agenda, resurrecting the past to empower the present. The speaker of “Polaroids” seems aware that history has this power, and I would argue that we should read the refrain’s tone as ironically cautionary: “memories are gobos making shadows on the locked present / that has been fixed, so it’s best to leave them dead.” A gobo is an object used in studio photography and filmmaking that is placed in front of a light source to create patterns of shadow. In Diggs’ metaphor, memory acts like a gobo, obstructing and warping one’s view of the present. Later in the track, Diggs describes memories as “demons trying to burn the edges of the present,” projecting yet another sense in which the past haunts and possesses us. Telling listeners to leave their memories dead, Diggs would seem to be issuing a warning: Don’t go digging up the past. Yet if we read closely, we sense that Diggs the speaker may not want us to dig—but Diggs the writer absolutely does. Here and elsewhere, Diggs constructs an ironic distance between himself and the personae of his lyrics, who can be read as semi-fictitious versions of himself despite never speaking in the first person (a challenge Diggs admits setting for himself). They are observant characters who direct listeners toward a critical perspective on the lyrical content. In “Polaroids,” Diggs adopts the persona of a status quo apologist, imploring listeners to let sleeping (or dead) dogs lie; yet as the track reveals—doing its best Faulkner impression—the past is neither sleeping nor dead, and it is definitely not past.
“Polaroids” further realizes its historical consciousness through a clever play of anachronism, describing photographs that appear to be from 1929 and concern a banker’s or businessman’s death by suicide: “frozen in this pantomime, a moment where it happened / time would split off with a fix to make its mighty mountains cry / but curled lip and terror eyes, a giveaway of what she hides / the backside of the picture dated 1929.” These lines conclude the first verse and date its photographs (there appear to be two of them, one depicting a corporate board meeting shortly before an attendee dies by suicide, and the other depicting his funeral) to the year of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed. Photography aficionados will recall, however, that the first Polaroid instant camera was not invented until the late 1940s. Moreover, verse one’s photographs feature a Cadillac El Dorado, acrylic nails, and whiteboards, none of which appeared until the 1950s. The temporal oddities of “Polaroids” complicate where (not to mention when) we locate the deaths foreshadowed by the described images. The confluence of anachronistic particulars suggests a counterintuitive sense of historical synchronicity: that the market convulsions of 1929 and those that take place in later decades are part of one economic picture.
In the literal polaroids of “Polaroids,” this paradoxical picture is rendered doubly material: as both the medium of depiction and the history of industrial capitalism. And yet, the visual can only be accessed through the track’s ekphrastic style. The desire to look competes with the impulse to listen. The purported photographs offer themselves to listeners as a hallucinated past that nonetheless generate a sense of uncertainty about what the past is and to what futures it may lead. Moving forward into one of these possible futures, the track’s second verse depicts a third photo, whose date is unspecified, featuring riders at an amusement park as captured by an on-ride camera, which typically snaps pictures of a ride’s most intense moment (usually the first drop). Diggs, however, urges listeners to look past the foreground of the image—the roller coaster riders—to its background: “the deep green of the foliage so definitively wild / people used to drive to places like this just to escape / if you look close, you can see the early fiber optic cables / stretching out into the jungle, the beginning of the end.” The pretense of leisure and recreation gives way to a scene of technological incursion, exploitation, and energy regimes: the fiber optic cables that will eventually become the arsenal of Silicon Valley and the high-frequency trading firms of Wall Street, not to mention the surveillance infrastructures (from on-ride cameras to orbital satellites) that threaten total visibility even as they regulate what we can and cannot know.
The interplay between foreground and background returns listeners again to a position of uncertainty over where to look, whether to look, and what precisely we are seeing. Inviting listeners to become investigators, Diggs the ekphrastic rigor of “Polaroids” recalls clipping.’s 2020 track “Body for the Pile,” placing listeners at the scene of a crime. In gruesome detail, Diggs fantasizes about what must have happened to an unnamed policeman murdered in their office: “badge with his name makes blood on the tongue / ‘cause it’s pinned to his right cheek, right where the gun / must have first flirted before it was stuck in his mouth / Officer —, with his brains blown out.” The speaker’s imagination fills in the gaps much like an investigator trying to unpuzzle the scene. Yet, despite the speaker’s voyeuristic access to the grisly details, the picture remains incomplete, the production of the track underscoring this omission by bleeping out the officer’s name. This act of self-censorship contrasts with the otherwise lurid details, and listeners are left wondering at the technical artifact—a glitch? a clip?—that has interfered with their listening. The bleep underscores the irony of the entire track—what we might call its gobo-effect, calling back to the refrain of “Polaroids.”
Released the same year as the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd (the latter two at the hands of police officers), and in the wake of mounting protests against police brutality that included the murders of Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castile, as well as Eric Garner’s murder by an officer who deployed an illegal chokehold, clipping.’s track verbalizes the fantasy of retributive violence against the police. This fantasy is an explicit rebuke of the culture wars that consume recent political discourse, in which right-wing pundits work incessantly to decouple the history of American racism from contemporary acts of violence against people of color. It seems only fitting that clipping. chooses to redirect the gruesome content of racially motivated murders committed by police back toward those who terrorize Black communities under the guise of public safety and protection of property. Juxtaposed with attempts by police officers to conceal or erase dashcam and bodycam footage, “Body for the Pile” generates an ironic effect, encouraging its listeners to consider the ethics of witnessing. By contrast, the police don’t want any witnesses.
Moreover, the track underscores the obscene logic that dictates social and juridical leniency toward law enforcement: “office highly decorated / plastic frames around diplomas, all the commendations / accommodating swivel chair where the blue-suited sir sits slumped.” These lyrics from the track’s second verse call out the hypocrisy embedded in the media’s rationalizations of police brutality, concealing the perversity of oppression beneath the meritocratic luster of graduation and promotion. Just as the media’s propaganda and celebration of police have historically served as metaphorical gobos, obscuring the crimes committed by law enforcement, “Body for the Pile” obscures its crime scenes in ways that call attention to the history of police brutality.
Where the early verses of “Body for the Pile” discover murdered police in the enclosed spaces of their stations and offices, suggesting that the listener has stepped into a space not accessible to civilians, the third and final verse moves its listeners to a street scene. After a police car jumps the curb and launches its driver through the windshield, medics and other detectives arrive to piece together what has happened. Importantly, this third scene is the only one that features onlookers—those occupying the sidewalks near the crash. Yet, these ostensible witnesses claim to have witnessed nothing: “the people leaving the scene and saying they never seen him.” Diggs’s description mentions onlookers snapping photographs—“all the flashing of the cameras is lighting up the noontime cold”—but the event of the accident remains unrecorded, as those who saw refuse to testify. The only potential source of documentation is an overhead traffic camera: “detective notices the traffic camera then calls the station to back it up.” The presence of surveillance is a dark echo of the on-ride camera from “Polaroids”; unlike the amusement park photograph, the street recording remains unseen and undescribed. The accident and officer’s death exist on a server somewhere, inaccessible both to Diggs and to the track’s listeners. The traffic camera disseminates policing into a virtual network, a cybernetic cop with no face whose presence is everywhere. The promise of voyeuristic access that Diggs teases in his lyrics gives way to the gobo-effect of information security, reminding readers of the structural conditions that protect those in positions of power.
clipping.’s ekphrastic style and Diggs’s hyperspeed vocal delivery insinuate a kind of informational transparency, even as this attention to visual detail is undercut by the embedded elisions, contradictions, and ambiguities in “Polaroids” and “Body for the Pile.” It is fitting, then, that some parkgoers in the final verse of “Polaroids” perform the failure of total vision through their explicit refusal to look as the ride descends its first drop: “hands in the air—half eyes wide, half eyes smiling / and a couple others with they heads covered up, too afraid to look.” What are we, the listeners, also too afraid to see? In clipping.’s ekphrastic style, horror arises from the disorientation of information overload and contextual confusion, offering an aesthetic critique of a world in which everything is recorded and nothing is clear.
Patrick Whitmarsh is Assistant Professor of English at College of the Holy Cross, where he specializes in modern American fiction and the environmental humanities. He enjoys listening to heavy metal with his three-year-old, who calls it “fire dragon music.”
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