Album Review: EXPERIMENTAL RAP by JPEGMAFIA

JPEGMAFIA spent half a decade letting his provocation outrun his writing. On EXPERIMENTAL RAP, they arrive at the same time, and leave nowhere safe to stand.

Courtesy of AWAL Recordings America, Inc.

You may have arrived at this album with a tweet already written. JPEGMAFIA built his career on noise about noise, his provocations had outpaced his writing, “king of experimental rap” was being shouted by someone whose songs had stopped doing it for him. On “Pop this Heat,” a pitched-up R&B vocal sample from a gospel-adjacent melody sits over a boom-bap rhythm while Peggy sings four lines of compressed contempt. “Man, these niggas so sweet, man, these hoes so weak, he ain’t gon’ pop this heat, he don’t got hands or feet.” His syllables get held against that gospel sample like syllables written by someone who waited eight years to put teeth and tune in equal weight on a single hook, and the equal weight is the rebuttal.

Trash-talk preceded the record by a full quarter, then turned out to be production direction. In Pigeons & Planes he declared that “there’s no one who competes with me” and took shots at peers for wanting to rap like LUCKI. In a Billboard piece the summer before, Earl Sweatshirt and The Alchemist had been “making the same fucking song for the last twenty fucking years.” Earl responded on Instagram by calling his music “gnarled, rough, and ugly.” Those three adjectives turn out to be the brief for “Meet the Dealers,” where the grinding metallic synth bass line grinds against the looped siren while bars about Phil Jackson and patty-cake handclaps stack into a Kansas City verse from his Republic-era collaborator DATPIFFMAFIA. “Literary or the physical, I send a man both.” Peggy was writing his press too.

Critics get something on “head.” “Suck me soft or take the condom off and jump in the bed” is the line that confirms the worst version of the read. The fragmented vocal stabs do work the rhymes cannot.

Picture someone in a parked car at a red light when “His Will” ends. The choir has been holding sustained notes about the sun beginning to fall and the will of God, percussion gone, choir multitracked into something close to hymn. The light turns. “Lights” comes in like a door kicked open, house tempo, cyclical synth, “I feel like Ye when I’m tweaking, I gotta defend it, my blick in the pelican.” That whiplash is the album’s actual argument, and any listener who waits for the seam will be standing at the light when the next car horn arrives.

Political material on a JPEGMAFIA album was being read as provocation cosplay until “The Ghost of Emmett Till.” “Fuck Carolyn Bryant, my niggas dying, it’s R.I.P. Emmett. She did the crime but ain’t do the time, she in Hell with no helmet.” Helmet rhymes Emmett and the punchline gets landed on what hell does not provide, a piece of theology nobody would have asked Peggy for in 2018.

Veteran in 2018 ran on production that did things rap radio had not heard, with rapping that kept up some of the time. Peggy was a producer with a guest rapper on his own album who happened to be himself. He is thirty-six now. That same hyper-compressed lo-fi filter sits underneath a Russian folk vocal ensemble that opens “GYBB” before the 70s-funk breakbeat shoves it aside, and underneath the counting machine on “¥ (Yen).” His rapping holds up next to his production now. “I love my funding like some people love on they cousins” was not the writing of the man who made Veteran. Neither was “all of this guap, I just can’t decline.”

By minute fifty Peggy has assembled his evidence into something an opening tweet cannot dismiss. Buzzy Lee carries Peggy’s only quiet stretch on “Bridges on Fire,” with Sasha Spielberg singing about all of her friends and bridges on fire over the chipmunk-soul interpolation. A Charlie Kirk loop opens “The 1st Amendment,” and Peggy rolls into “all of this white-on-white violence too real, I guess now you know how it feels.” Peggy raps from a White House sofa on “Mask On.” Trayvon Martin’s name appears next to AR-15 imagery on “No Strippers In Heaven.” On “Since I Met Ye” the internal-rhyme run that three best-rap-verses lists won’t be able to print without scare quotes is the syntax Peggy has been working toward. “Lately, I been feelin’ like Tyson, now when I’m swinging on these niggas like they Robin Givens.”

Great (★★★★☆)

Favorite Track(s): “The Ghost of Emmett Till,” “Since I Met Ye,” “No Strippers In Heaven”