JPEGMAFIA, rap's most tireless agitator, looks inward

In January, the rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA ignited some frustrated chatter online when a photo of him and Kanye West, hinting at a collaboration, appeared on his Instagram. JPEG had long been vocal about how much he revered Kanye, and the role that the G.O.O.D. Music architect had played in his musical education. But given the widespread dismay at his hero’s anti-semitic antics (“Kanye’s a Nazi now,” JPEG himself lamented in an interview just last year), the backlash was predictable and immediate. The artist fired back, justifying his participation in what would become Vultures 1, Ye’s first tag-team album with Ty Dolla $ign, as apolitical: a long-awaited call up to the majors by his favorite rapper ever, their connection nothing more than a fated bucket list moment. “its offensive to me that some people on here took a moment i had been waiting on my whole life and twisted into some weird ass oppression olympics,” he wrote in an Instagram story. “I make goals and i achieve them. you make mean reddit threads. We will never be alike no matter how much u want it be.”

It should be no surprise, then, that JPEG’s own new solo album uses the slight as fuel. “When they can’t read you like a book / They gon’ try to attack what you stand on,” he raps a few minutes into I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU (released Aug. 2), before resetting his terms: “I’ma take off even if I land wrong / And take everything I can get my hands on.” Later on, he sounds nearly giddy poking fun at the online firestorm, rapping “The lies don’t stick, narratives ain’t fittin’ / Now they gotta pivot, the goalpost shifts” near the end of “Exmilitary,” a song that fires from the hip in all directions — at family, at exes, at bros with no Black friends, at nepo babies, at opps who move too much like “Harvey, Jeffrey, R. Kelly,” the unholy trinity of celebrity sex offenders. In place of what he deems fake news about his character, he presents a rousing, dogmatic set of songs hell bent on not just name-clearing but identity-protecting, over production that erupts with the frenzy of hardcore punk. And yet, beneath the mayhem, there is also a bit of second-guessing, a startling development for one of hip-hop’s most relentless wise guys.

A collage artist working somewhere between noise rap and sound design, JPEGMAFIA has for years stood at the forefront of an edgy cohort of hip-hop doomscrollers tapped into the culture wars. He emerged as a Bandcamp success story in 2018 with his second album, Veteran, which was refreshing for all of its glitchy dissonance, channeling the harshness of Throbbing Gristle, the off-balance hardcore nerddom of MF DOOM and the madcap mania of Ol’ Dirty Bastard for pointedly unresolved songs about gentrification in Williamsburg, hipsters infiltrating rap culture and the limits of liberalism. Subsequent albums increased the muchness of his sound by several degrees: 2019's All My Heroes Are Cornballs was tectonic in structure, constantly shifting and embracing melody with a proudly nonsensical execution, while establishing the open dialogue with his audience that would linger throughout his rise. “Young Peggy, I'm a false prophet / Bringin' white folks this new religion / My fans need new addictions,” he declared. “Rap been so good to me, I hope it get me canceled.” 2021's LP!, released in online and offline versions for sample clearance reasons, swung toward a clipping, synthy avant-garde sound and an intense preoccupation with beef. All along, he has matched trolling with trolling, creating a confrontational relationship with his public. Many see him as terminally online and sometimes paradoxical; he sees those who @ him as representative of a widespread scourge he must rail against, once calling himself a villain to basement dwellers. He has never been shy about his own history, as a Black Southern transplant and Air Force veteran turned rap beatmaker by way of sheer overexposure to the internet. But after four albums of kick-in-your-teeth rap making memes out of politicos and sycophants, ILDMLFY is his first to point toward something beyond snark and fury: an untangling of his contradictions, weighing online discourse’s idea of who he is against who he knows himself to be.

That starts, apparently, with setting the record straight. Seemingly answering for something at every moment, JPEG targets his trolls here as if taking up arms to defend his honor. These raps are some of his most biting and snappy; he sounds amped up delivering them, at times agitated but never inconvenienced, and maybe even taking a little joy in what he clearly sees as punching down. “Hating for free but you can’t pay your rent / If you’re gonna d***-ride, make it make cents,” he raps on “it’s dark and hell is hot.” A lot of rap is preoccupied with hate — resentment and envy, specifically — but JPEG has a way of approximating the snowballing whataboutism of the social web, making it seem like he is penetrating its surreal, suffocating clutch even as the echo chamber bears down on him. On “New Black History,” he raps, “Y’all wish I kept on eatin’ prison lunch ‘cause I’m tweetin’ too much,” sounding emboldened to keep posting around a shadow-ban. It isn’t just that he sees his own continued success as a panacea; for him, his music stands as the only real and true thing about him online, an answer for those looking to puzzle him out.

He has spent a lot of his catalog sniping at rap rivals, waving off burner-account critiques and picking actual fights (“All of my songs a diss,” he admitted on 2021’s “Nemo”), and this album is as defined by bird-flipping vitriol as any other. But the thrashing energy found at its start dissipates as it goes on, revealing a self-conscious mind, if not apologetic then at least troubled. “I can’t defend this b**** up in the mirror / I’d rather ask forgiveness than permission,” he raps on “Don’t Put Anything on the Bible.” Later on, he adds, “My b**** never got taken from me, I lost her myself / My b**** never got comfort from me, I needed too much help.” He doesn’t seem much interested in that help now, and it would be imprecise to say he expresses anything like contrition. But he is drawn into a brooding space — thinking about substance abuse and sobriety, his relationship to class, his military background and the music machine, assessing the damage caused by his disposition within his very niche, very online sphere of influence.

This self-assessment — a tenacious agitator questioning how those urges affect how he operates, and affect those around him — is guided by dynamic, detailed production that can be as exquisite as it is face-melting. Many of the beats open up to reveal a second beat inside them, as if experiencing a zoological metamorphosis. They swing both ways: from quiet to busy, or from intense to subdued. Sometimes they go from loud to louder. “JIHAD JOE” explodes from breakbeat bliss into a ripping metal mash. After a celestial overture from Buzzy Lee on “Don’t Put Anything on the Bible,” a switch flips from saintly splendor to more grounded guitar riffs. The collagist's instincts are still in overdrive here, piecing together everything from Logan Roy sound bites to NBA footage, flipping ‘70s Japanese jazz and contemporary baile funk, repurposing classic soul drums from Sly & the Family Stone. But it all is done with such a steady hand as to feel not just like a densely sampled, brazenly engineered world in miniature, which is true of both LP! and the Danny Brown collab Scaring the Hoes, but like it has turned the sum of its oddball parts into the fabric of a unified aesthetic. He goes about things much differently, but in effect, he starts to take after the old Kanye, making maximalism feel integrated and harmonious.

Speaking of which, the distance at this moment between JPEGMAFIA and Kanye West couldn’t be any more apparent after the Saturday release of Ye’s second album with Ty Dolla $ign, Vultures 2, another kitchen-sink effort showcasing the worst impulses of a capricious egomaniac. Kanye is at the other end of the firestarter life cycle, and his music is increasingly about provocation without end. You can hear in his recent songs an attempt to channel the ambition and intention of his classic, transformative run, but behaviorally, he’s become a damaged nerve ending, unable to relay external stimuli to the hive-mind entity he inhabits — which itself has come to feel less like a cohort of experts under the orchestration of an Oppenheimer-like maestro, and more like a cult committed to a ringleader’s suicide pact. Shortly before JPEG got the call to work on Vultures 1, he had publicly voiced his exasperation at the state of the Kanye machine — “U got 27 n****s tweaking hi hats just to make some mid,” he wrote on X — and hinted at himself as the caliber of beatmaker whose tinkering might actually do some good. In the end, his contributions were among that album’s most distinct and fully realized. And listening to both artists’ new records side by side, the difference in their current methods feels overwhelmingly clear.

There is, after all, a purposefulness missing from Ye’s stunts. His persistent tardiness (both Vultures albums followed weeks of unclear teases and blew their release dates by a day) reads as the sign of an artist who doesn’t know when to stop, and that endless tampering seems to mostly serve a vision of his own genius. He can feel, at times, like a trespasser in his own control room, actively sabotaging songs. Like his new producing partner, he is motivated above all by outside hate and perceived snubs (“You tried to bring me to my lowest, I still brought the vision / I see through the blinds,” he raps on Vultures 2’s “Time Moving Slow”), but that admonishment no longer focuses him, as it once did on the career-resetting My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. JPEG favors Ye in many ways, good and bad, but I hear in the younger artist’s latest work not only a flowering master craftsmanship, but a willingness to confront the idea of what his music is for.

When I interviewed JPEG a few years ago in the lead-up to All My Heroes Are Cornballs, he cited Kanye as the thesis of the title’s message — that listeners should not put their faith in artists, simply because they do not know them. Yet even then he would not judge his idol, already deep in the palm of Trumpism, because he believed anyone, himself included, could end up there. I’ve thought about that stance a lot while listening to these albums. JPEG could very well end up just like Kanye one day, but the foresight in that comment suggests, to me, an artist seeking awareness rather than faith. That’s what I read in his album’s supplicating title, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU — a recognition, even between barbs, that provocation is often merely a cover for a desperate desire to be seen and understood.