JPEGMAFIA/ Danny Brown: SCARING THE HOES
JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown deliver an irreverent, uncommercial glitch-hop record that sticks to its guns.
If you’ve ever mustered up the social chutzpah to take control of the AUX, you’ll have felt the burn of 50-or-so faces staring at you with disgust as the playlist cuts from warm, inoffensive vibes - as per those bland Men I Trust house mixes plastered across YouTube’s recommended section - to Xiu Xiu, or worse, Black Midi. It might be referred to as “scaring the hoes”, a form of social-embarrassment brought on by an exposure to loud, weird noises where all female guests hurry for the nearest exit and take the coke with them.
But in the hands of rap heretics Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA, this is not just some flavor-of-the-month snark typed onto a 17-year-old Discord mod’s crusty keyboard, it's a weapon of mass iconoclasm fired from the hip: a football-sized nuke pumped with Wockhardt and irreverence, in which industry bullshit (“Swing on these actors/ these rappers faker than Andy Kaufman”),Twitter-addicted neo fascists (“I’m the black Marjorie Taylor Greene”), and neurotic Caucasians (“White people love makin' excuses and bitchin', I guess it's what culture is for them”) are caught in its blast zone. Look close enough and the mushroom cloud might still be visible.
And if this sounds more like the work of supervillains than rappers - as Brown quips on “Burfict!” - it’s because the dyad toy with the project like they’re held up in a secret lair, with Peggy layering huge, bombastic sounds with laser-beam precision until horn-filled fanfares supercharge bars about dickriding fans, and sparkling synth lines rub shoulders with obscure references to fitness YouTubers. “Lean Beef Patty” falls into the latter category, seemingly pushing the start button on a McDonald’s toy to reveal Ginuwine’s “I Need a Girl (Pt. 2)” coiled through a helium-inhaling, speed-garage skittering beat straight out of 2007. It would be an introduction ready for collapsing under its own irony, if it weren’t for the way the whole track seems to foam from the mouth from about a few seconds in, seizing on a solution of bass bomblets and Iron Sheik-labia-stretching larks as they pass down the gullet and explode in the stomach, all ‘shoot first, ask questions later’.
Title track “Scaring the Hoes”, meanwhile, turns up the “scariness” to max volume, churning and wheezing like a sax being thrown through a meat grinder whilst Peggy and Brown assume the position of a greedy A&R man, demanding you turn off the “weird shit” and make something that’ll bring in those Katy Perry stacks. And though these smidgeons of sharp, insolent humour recall, at least in part, a platform for the pair to smirk at their own compatibility with ‘casual’ listening - all a newbie need do is survive the sensory holocaust of Peggy’s Veteran, or wade through Brown’s Attrocity Exhibition without being pulled into its abyss - it also feels like a big ‘fuck you’ to the major labels (and their legion of nerdy, teenage wallets): a refusal to abandon one’s stripes as members of the new avant-garde, or be thrown into some some gross, corporate cabal where white marketability determines one’s value as an artist.
“Steppa Pig”, a player-ass riff on a kid’s show about anthropomorphic pigs, is a militant vindication of this resolve. Whirring synths offset with a glitch-hop fuzz serve as springboards for some of Brown’s most unhinged moments that recall the grimey bacchanalia of his XXX days: “My brain fried, don't do drugs / Had two plugs, one just died”. Peggy? He matches Brown’s incivility with fervor, sharing a taste in banned pharmaceuticals (“Uh, back in this bitch with the dope, she backin' it up for a gram”), and sailing through the track with a soulful buoyancy, before aiming his Ruger through the computer to unload on 2chan users.
Upon seeing the 36-minute runtime, you might wonder if enough breathing room is provided for these giants to stretch their legs, particularly when the volume of their personalities match the ubiquity of the beats. But don’t get it twisted: tracks like “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up / Muddy Waters” prove the pair’s ability to drop jumbo-sized heat on a coin: Brown’s flips and razor-barbed wordplay - “You satire, camp fires to Al-Qaeda / I'm like the only lighter in Rikers” - exhibit why he’s got some of your favorite rappers walking on a lead; Peggy’s so-laid-back-he’s-asleep bounce is at once reminiscent of West Coast stalwarts Dr Dre and Eazy E, and channels their insouciant cool like he’s about to sign to Ruthless. Sure, “Fentanyl Tester” might overdo it on the bass; Brown’s verse loses itself in a wave of fuzz, rendering Peggy the star of the show by default. But this is “Scaring the Hoes”, after all; a face-melting mindfuck made on a Roland SP-404 from 2005, and constituted by a full metal jacket of sound and supervillain-esque schemes. Want easy listening? Go back to the Men I Trust house mix.