In January, rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA sparked outrage online when he posted a photo to his Instagram that hinted at a collaboration with Kanye West. JPEG has long been vocal about his admiration for Kanye and the role the architect of good music played in his musical education. But given his widespread dismay at his hero's anti-Semitic behavior (“Kanye is now a Nazi,” JPEG himself lamented in an interview last year), the backlash was predictable and swift. JPEG fought back, justifying his participation in what would later become “Kanye is now a Nazi” activism. Vulture 1Ye's first album with Ty Dolla $ign. Apolitical. A long-awaited promotion to a major by my favorite rapper of all time, their connection is just a fateful bucket-list moment. “It sickens me that some people on here have taken away a moment I've waited my whole life for and twisted it into some weird oppression Olympics,” he wrote on his Instagram Story. “I set goals and I achieve them. You guys make mean reddit threads. No matter how much you want it to be, we will never be the same.”
It's not surprising then that JPEG's own new solo album draws on that disdain as fuel: “When they can't read you like a book, they try to attack what you stand on,” he raps a few minutes later. I will give my life for you On “Exmilitary,” out August 2, he resets the terms: “I’ll take flight if the landing’s wrong/And I’ll take whatever I can get.” He then sounds almost gleeful, mocking the online outrage, rapping, “I ain’t gonna lie, the story doesn’t fit/Now they gotta pivot, the goalposts move” near the end of “Exmilitary.” The song improvises attacks in every direction: at family, ex-lovers, comrades with no black friends, nepobabies, and foes who act too much like the unholy trinity of celebrity sex offenders: “Harvey, Jeffrey, R. Kelly.” In place of what he considers fake news about his character, he sticks to identity protection as well as honor restoration, delivering a series of erupting, opinionated songs overproduced with hardcore-punk frenzy. But behind the mayhem lurks a touch of thought, a surprising development for one of hip-hop’s most relentless wisecrackers.
Collage artist JPEGMAFIA, who sits somewhere between noise rap and sound design, has long been at the forefront of a hip-hop doomscrolling vanguard that has entered the culture wars, emerging as a Bandcamp success story in 2018 with his sophomore album. veteranFresh despite its glitchy dissonance, the album recalls the roughness of Throbbing Gristle, the off-kilter hardcore nerdism of MF Doom, and the reckless madness of Ol' Dirty Bastard, with overtly unresolved songs about the gentrification of Williamsburg, the hipster infiltration of rap culture, and the limits of liberalism. Subsequent albums have upped the versatility of his sound by several notches. 2019's All my heroes are cornballs Structurally complex, ever-shifting and proudly no-nonsense, he embraced melody in his performances while establishing an open dialogue with his audience that would remain throughout his rise. “Young Peggy, I'm a false prophet/Bringing this new religion to the white man/My fans need a new addiction,” he declared. “Rap's been so good to me I hope it cancels me out.” LP!was released in online and offline versions for sample clearance, and leaned towards clipping, synthesizer avant-garde sounds and a penchant for hard-hitting beef. He's always had a divisive relationship with his fans, trolling after trolling. Many see him as terminally and sometimes contradictory online. He sees those who @ him as representative of the wider scourge he must rail against, and once called himself the villain to basement dwellers. He's never been shy about his background as a black Southern Air Force veteran who became a rap beatmaker through overexposure to the internet. But after four albums of hard-hitting rap that turned politicians and followers into memes, Ildomulfi This was the first time he'd gone beyond sarcasm and rage – to weigh the image online discourse had of him against his own perception of who he was, and to unravel his contradictions.
It starts, it seems, with getting the facts straight. JPEG, who always seems to have an answer, here targets his trolls as if he's taking up arms to defend his honor. These raps are some of his sharpest and most crisp. He sounds excited when he delivers them, sometimes upset but never inconvenienced, and maybe even a little happy about what he sees as an obvious underdog. “Hate ain't gonna pay the rent / If you're gonna do shit, make money,” he raps in the “dark and hell is hot” lyric. While a lot of rap is obsessed with hate, specifically resentment and jealousy, JPEG knows how to get close to the snowballing “whateverism” of the social web, and makes it seem like he's breaking through the surreal and suffocating shackles that the echo chambers are putting him under. In “New Black History,” he raps, “They'll wish I was eating prison lunches, I tweet too much,” and sounds brave enough to keep posting despite the shadow ban. He doesn't just see his continued success as a panacea: To him, his music is the only truth about him online, the answer to those trying to figure him out.
He's spent much of his past work criticizing rap rivals, ignoring the criticism of throwaway accounts, or actually picking fights. (“All my songs are diss,” he admitted on 2021's Nemo). And this album, like his others, is defined by its contemptuous vitriol. But the fierce energy of the opening fades as the songs progress, revealing a self-consciousness, or if not an apology, then at least a troubled heart. “I can't defend this bitch in front of the mirror/I'd rather beg forgiveness than ask permission,” he raps on “Don't Put Anything on the Bible.” He later adds, “My bitch never got taken from me, I lost her myself/My bitch never got comforted by me, I needed too much help.” It wouldn't be accurate to say he's expressing any sort of contrition, since he doesn't seem all that interested in any new help. But he finds himself drawn into a reflective world as he muses on drug abuse and sobriety, his relationship with class, his military career and the music industry, assessing the damage his personality has caused within his very niche online sphere of influence.
This self-examination — a persistent instigator who questions how these impulses affect his actions and those around him — is guided by dynamic, meticulous production that's as smile-inducing as it is masterful. Many of the beats open up to reveal a second beat within, as if undergoing an animal metamorphosis. They oscillate in both directions, from quiet to buzzing, from intense to subdued. At times, they go from loud to even louder. “JIHAD JOE” explodes from breakbeat bliss into a thumping metal mash. After Budgie Lee's celestial overture on “Don't Put Anything on the Bible,” the holy glow switches to a more down-to-earth guitar riff. The collage talent is still in full swing here, splicing together everything from Logan Roy soundbites to NBA footage, flipping '70s Japanese jazz with contemporary baile funk, and repurposing the classic soul drums of Sly & the Family Stone, but it's all done with such a steady hand that it doesn't just feel like a densely sampled and boldly designed world in miniature. LP! Collaboration with Danny Brown Scare the prostitutesbut it seems to have transformed the sum of its odd parts into a unified aesthetic structure. Though he approaches things quite differently, he's actually beginning to emulate the old Kanye in making maximalism seem unified and harmonious.
Speaking of which, the distance between JPEGMAFIA and Kanye West couldn't have been more clear with the release of Kanye's second album with Ty Dolla Sign on Saturday. Vulture 2is yet another over-the-top effort showcasing the worst impulses of a wayward, egocentric human being. Kanye is on the other side of the firebrand life cycle, his music becoming more and more endlessly provocative. His latest songs contain attempts to communicate his classic transformative ambition and intent, but behaviorally he has become a damaged nerve ending unable to transmit external stimuli to the collective consciousness he inhabits. The collective consciousness itself has come to feel more like a cult adhering to a mastermind's suicide pact than a group of experts under the direction of a mastermind like Oppenheimer. Vulture 1In 2000, he publicly voiced his exasperation with the status quo of the Kanye Machine, writing that X had “27 black dudes messing around with hi-hats just to make mids,” implying that his tinkering might actually do some good. In the end, his contributions were the most distinctive and accomplished on the album, and listening to both artists' new records side-by-side makes the difference in their current approaches starkly clear.
Ultimately, Ye's stunts lack a sense of purpose. His persistent tardiness (both Vulture The album's release (which began after weeks of unclear teasers, then pushed the release date back by a day) reads as a sign of an artist who doesn't know when to stop, and whose endless tampering seems mostly in service of his own genius vision. It sometimes feels like he's invading his own control room and actively sabotaging his songs. Like his new producing partner, he's motivated more by outside hatred and callous treatment than anything else (“You tried to take me to the lowest but I've got a vision/Seeing through the blinds,” he raps). Vulture 2“Time moves slowly,” is a line in the poem by My beautiful dark and twisted fantasyWhile JPEG likes Ye for many things, good and bad, the young artist's latest work demonstrates not only blossoming craftsmanship but also a willingness to confront ideas about what his music is about.
A few years ago, when I interviewed JPEG, All my heroes are cornballshe cited Kanye as an argument for the title's message: that listeners shouldn't trust artists just because they don't know them. And yet he didn't try to criticize his idol, who was already so deeply in the clutches of Trumpism, because he believed that anyone could become that way, including himself. I thought a lot about that stance while listening to these albums. While JPEG could well end up the same way as Kanye one day, the prescience of the comment suggests to me an artist who seeks recognition over faith. That's what I read into the begging titles of his albums. I will give my life for you — Amid the harsh words, there is a recognition that provocation is merely a cover for a deeper desire to be noticed and understood.
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