JPEGMAFIA - All My Heroes Are Cornballs

Additional Editing by Anouska Liat

With the internet reigning supreme over culture, hip-hop has become the primary route for experimentation, kicking rock music out of the wheelhouse with new ideas mutating at an unprecedented rate. While we could spend all day talking about Travis Scott’s psychedelic trap or Tyler, the Creator’s wide-screening of jazz-rap, experimental hip-hop has specifically entered a golden age within the past ten years. Names like ‘Death Grips’ and ‘clipping.’ have earnt a place on that mantle as unrelenting boundary-pushers, and looking up at them in anticipation is Baltimore native Barrington Hendricks, known artistically as JPEGMAFIA. That moniker hasn’t left the public discourse since he dropped Veteran over 18 months ago, a project that infiltrated online blogs and the ears of rap fans and artists alike. The attraction to the man they call Peggy is that he brings an energy that few else can. The fact that James Blake and Jeff Tweedy of Wilco both were unable to pick out their influence on his music demonstrates how far-reaching, yet tightly compartmentalised, the inspirations are. The interviews with Blake, Tweedy and more were part of a wonderful piece of sloganeering leading up to release that poked fun and alluded to the ‘disappointing sequel’ cliche. However, the end product feels like a celebration of JPEGMAFIA’s success becoming a crusader of experimental rap, meanwhile continuing to dig deeper into the fresh unknown.

Sonically, it’s an unhinged set of rides that puts industrial rap under a kaleidoscopic microscope. His manic use of samples and snippets, be it vocal or instrumental, is as close as audio gets to abstract expressionism. This quality in his music is like browsing through the contents of his treasured MacBook’s file explorer. Though Peggy can navigate through it with ease, knowing every section of his labyrinthine archive and why every piece is there, on the outside it’s a mess that we are completely unknown to. Yet it’s that rush of touring through that is utterly vital to the enticement factor.

Similarly packed-in is an artillery of electronics that range from arcade-like to boisterous, but all play off the more traditional, lo-fi-coated instruments in a Gigeresque fashion. The drums veer away from the typical breakbeat of boom-bap, or the rumbling 808 style of trap music, instead using sounds and crunches that no-one else dare touch. The final stroke of JPEGMAFIA’s masterwork is the man himself, with all of his voices and sides that operate and overlap like a Cerberus - described as ‘the monstrous watchdog of the underworld'. So many descriptors have been crammed into this paragraph as an attempt to summarise the aesthetic but in truth, the song-for-song structure of All My Heroes Are Cornballs is so sinuous, it even makes the tracklist redundant.

Scruffing the listener’s attention from the get-go with the amazingly-titled opener ‘Jesus Forgive Me, I Am A Thot’, Peggy wastes no time going through the gears amongst explosive samples of crowd tumult. Side by side with eerily-swaying R&B chords that effortlessly transition from verse to chorus, he not only spits but uses autotune for the peak of the hook, sounding like an impression of an early 2000s teen-pop diva. Contrasting this is the 180-degree flip in the verse to reveal the aggressive persona established on previous efforts. It’s only a brief section, handing only four bars to a pre-emptive strike of bass and distortion before settling back down, but it’s indicative of the sheer density of every moment on the album. Instrumentally, no four bars are the same, consistently evolving and behaving as untamed as Cujo. Exhaling like a sentient being, the beats all have their own personalities; they can be aggressive, bashful, playful, they feel alive.

‘Beta Male Strategies’ starts and finishes with the same narcotic loop that skips like a locked groove at the end of a vinyl, sandwiching a song that houses many sonic details that whizz like Catherine wheels. The most invigorating spectacle is the switch-up in the final third that welcomes a strained guitar solo coloured with an art-rock-lifted chord progression. Ordinarily, this would be enough to fill the space of the track, but JPEG somehow laces more heavily-layered weaves, and this ‘kitchen sink’ attitude is present throughout the project.

JPEG actually refrained from editing sounds down on this project, wanting to attain a rawness and spontaneity seen on demo tapes. The most prominent difference on All My Heroes from Veteran is trading a reduction in acidity for a more texture-driven style, but subtle tweaks are still to be found. For one, there is more singing from Peggy on this one, almost as much as there is rapping, but because it is a JPEGMAFIA production it comes with a caveat. An artist once completely against rappers who sing,  is now embracing a new voice through the well-trodden medium of autotune, but as the vocal riffing on the opener indicates, Peggy finds a way to misshape it into a ghoulish mask for himself. Delving into noise pop on one of the project’s standouts, ‘Rap Grow Old & Die x No Child Left Behind’, he stands atop a bed of thunderous guitar, singing in the chorus and rapping some of his most memorable verses to date with a Q-Tip timbre. Special mention goes to the finger-snap outro that contrasts a mix-interjecting kick drum with fluttering, harp-like synth arpeggios. The sounds are all ear candy, and Peggy himself provides the lyrical protein.

JPEG is such an infectious and entertaining ringleader of this circus of a record, with all the traits of a forum user personified - his name literally comes from an image file. He’s got his head on straight, but isn’t afraid to go clenched-fist at his enemies. Be it his rap contemporaries, the alt-right, or seemingly the entirety of Twitter, Peggy has always got a bone to pick. Serving a choice buffet of cunning metaphors (‘get the picture or you and your niggas both cropped’ being the pick of the pile), ‘PTSD’ is an unspooling lyrical highlight reel. However it also demonstrates how he can go one better and flex his beliefs to his advantage: ‘No deal, y’all deal look something like Brexit’ is a crowning moment of scathing assertion, and as soon as it’s followed by ‘Bitin' crackers and wonder why you anorexic’, one of JPEGMAFIA’s most iconic lines is birthed.

Another winning characteristic is how he puts himself and what he loves into the one-liners he comes out with, chain-linking name-drops that could only come from a rapper that fully embodies internet culture. Not only on the meritorious cover song ‘BasicBitchTearGas’, where he takes TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’ and slows it down to a spliff tempo, but in his various references to Playstation 2-era action games; adored singers ranging from David Byrne to Carly Rae Jepsen, obscure fast-food restaurants, and vintage WWE wrestlers. As he shouts that he’ll ‘Bulldog a nigga like Trish Stratus’ beside what resonates like a hallucinogenic remix of a low-key piece from a Zelda soundtrack, one gets the feeling that this man may have conquered, nay become, the internet. One moment in particular where he sums himself up best exemplifies this. In the middle of an inflamed performance over the comparatively meditative beat of ‘Post Verified Lifestyle’, he drops the line “Bitch I'm Beanie Sigel, mixed with Beatles with a dash of DOOM at 98 degrees”.

Despite being such an anti-hero in hip-hop, he still reps the culture, even going out of his way to express distaste with rock music in the process. On wax, he doubles down on his antagonism on some cuts by taking rock music hostage, such as the turbulent send-off of ‘Kenan vs. Kel’, or even ‘PRONE!’. In concept, a punk track with no live instruments, Peggy appropriately brings a meteoric energy, but heavily filters the guitar on here to hang in the background rather than have it wail alongside him. More than mere imitation of your average bar band, he retorts back at the rules on his conquest to tear rock music to shreds. JPEG even cokes up indie-folk à la The Microphones on cuts like ‘Grimy Waifu’, and the rulebook is further ridiculed when examining his vision for post-production.

Common to many of those who have toyed with hip-hop this decade, the mixing is an overlooked key player in the success of this tracklist. While many mixers would work to round out the sound of the album, JPEG shapes it into something more interesting, accentuating, and warping specific elements to re-tune the ears. One of his many production tricks can be heard on ‘Free the Frail’, where the beat is pushed down on the start of a bar, leaving the bass in the foreground. The result is like a self-resolved audio error that is jarring, yet nonetheless embodies and forwards the spirit of experimental music. There’s a hint of meta-breaking cheekiness when some bars begin with audio dips that call to mind that bit of lag that happens when first hooking music up to speakers. So much detail is put into creating ideas and effects that many traditionalists would consider to be ‘poor mixing’ or ‘bad production’. It’s the taste of musical freedom, and the sweet epicentre of this is the album’s title track, ‘All My Heroes Are Cornballs’. This being one of the catchiest songs as JPEG croons on the snare of the beat as a plucked synthesizer tip-toes around it, in preparation for throwing itself out of sync in the outro over a skit involving a Wendy’s order.

Personally, the podium spots for the best albums of 2019 had already been decided by the end of the summer, but in true JPEGMAFIA fashion he aims to disturb that. Damn, Peggy.