The Hoes are Disappointed: A JPEGMAFIA album review

As I have listened to more and more music over the years, I have found that there are just some albums and some artists that I will have a personal beef with. In many cases the people around me and online will consider me crazy, a contrarian, or simply known as an idiot. I have been warned in many places about things I do not like, and the visceral hatred I have going towards them. This is, in fact, that case in question.

I Hate JPEGMAFIA.

As a certified music nerd, having 1000+ album and single ratings at this point in time, I am utterly an outlier in this situation. I love Hip-Hop to death. I love experimental shit to an endless degree. My love for the blend of the two is where we meet a point of who is actually good at it. From my personal taste, I enjoy the side of experimental that can make me feel like a third eye has opened into a world of complete and intense euphoria. I love the production on things such as Billy Wood’s record Aethiopes. Ex-Military makes it onto my top 100 albums of all time, and Government Plates’ deconstructed club bangers make my back arch in ways I have never fully understood. Danny Brown is a recent pick up for me, having loved Atrocity Exhibition’s sensibilities mixed with his intelligent and quite masterful lyricism. So as I saw the world splooging over this crossover between a name I vaguely knew and someone who I had gotten my hands on, my interest was piqued. I was in for an intense, but certainly well-thought time. 

I was wrong

If there was anything that could be said about this album’s actual problem, it would be right in the artist. JPEGMAFIA’s beat-making skills are about as well established as an FL Studio session at 2am while high out of your mind. The first and foremost problem with this album is its mixing. The mixing on here pushes Danny to the background for Peggy’s beats and rapping to fill the room. The center of attention feels like compensation for an inability to produce a single, worthwhile beat in his entire catalogue. I went through JPEGMAFIA’s entire catalogue from Veteran to now, and I have yet to find something interesting. And with this record, its biggest and single most disgusting flaw is the sampling.

The sample, in my opinion, should fit within the beat it’s used for. It should be the backbone and help that one needs to create a successful flip. For example, “Hacker” by Death Grips uses the percussion of a Marching Band practice drill to serve as the main driver for the beat. Another example being Ghais Guevara’s “Patrice Colours Took My Lunch Money” which it’s second half flips a Silk Sonic sample that feels belonging underneath Ghais’ rapping. The sampling technique of Scaring the Hoes, and Peggy’s line of work in general, is to take a sample that wouldn’t work with anything remotely close, and tack it on at the very end so that he can say he used it in a beat. Fentanyl Tester, Kingdom Hearts Key, Steppa Pig and Jack Harlow Combo Meal are all numerous examples of this type of lazy flips. If there was an equivalent of this, my guess would be trap producers saying they found this fire sample that they wanted to use, and then they bury it so far deep into the song over booming 808s and ungodly amounts of hihats. The only real successful flip in his entire catalogue, that gets ruined by such a bad second verse, is Garbage Pale Kids, which flips two Japanese commercials into a cromulent piece of work.

Another problem is the title and the types of bars we receive. Scaring the Hoes is probably the corniest they could’ve stolen, hailing from a TikTok talking about the upcoming collaboration. Peggy’s bars within this 36-minute edging session are the Twitter discourse circle kind, having way too echo-chamber bars that show a 35-year-old man’s 16-year-old psyche, unable to grow up and come up with more clever lyrics than 10-year-old internet references, calling his haters incels and crackers, or comparing himself to real life school shooters. Danny’s lyrics have some weight and carry a mature but off-his-rocker feeling to them, as a man of his age really should be doing. He’s filling out a scheme about Noah’s Ark, making references to sitcoms and fashion, and calling back to greats that inspired his sound. A 40-year-old Danny Brown has actual, tangible work into his wordplay, whereas JPEGMAFIA must rely on edgy internet references to gain shock value.

If there was a glimpse of hope for my liking, it is gone due to his twitter escapades and calling random white people related to Hitler and Slaveowners, along with his Vultures beef with Freddie Gibbs, to which Gibbs, like the great that he is, ignored the man and simply went about his day with Mister Rogers playing in the background. To feed a troll is to feed your own anger. And I will feed the troll one last time before signing him off as an utter joke to the world of Experimental Hip Hop.

JPEGMAFIA is an egotistical talentless hack who makes his money off white people’s masochistic tendency to want to be called a cracker. Everything he touches turns into unlistenable, poorly produced garbage that seeps into other areas of a record. Like a leper, he should be shunned from touching a DAW or sampler.