EXPERIMENTAL RAP

The first voice heard on JPEGMAFIA’s sixth solo album, EXPERIMENTAL RAP, is late comedian Paul Mooney doing what he did best: tearing into white fragility. “See, they funny when it’s about them,” Mooney says sharply, admonishing any caucasian listeners for not having thick enough skin to deal with jokes that land like raindrops when compared to the subjugation plaguing Black people daily: “Take it, you’ll get over it. I got over it; deal with it. No sense of humor about yourself…you can be talked about too, motherfucker.” The track is called “投影の芸術,” which, when translated from Japanese, means “The Art of Projection.”

When he first gained traction with 2015’s Communist Slow Jams, JPEG was a firestarter, taking stock of how racism had rotted the core of the internet and the world right outside his door, spewing poison back at the crackers grinning from their 4chan threads and venti Starbucks lattes. Guns were never far from his raps, but irony was his greatest weapon, skewering both sides of the political aisle with flashes of Black revolutionary rhetoric and the meme-fueled irreverence of a Discord admin with a sick Dipset mixtape collection. Now, 11 years in, the JPEGMAFIA project is a machine all its own, and his continued insistence on playing the heel has given his music a fiercely bitter undercurrent.

As his beats have grown more maximal, he’s become more paranoid and acerbic as he’s settled into something of a maverick power player position within alternative hip-hop. What once seemed like an agitator railing against the system has become a gatekeeper crushing dissidents under his thumb. “Since I met Ye, I’m dead to you niggas, that’s why I wear jet black,” he snarks at the fallout from meeting and working with his idol at the height of his Nazi leanings on the aptly titled “Since I Met Ye,” doing his best Undertaker impression. Also like Ye, EXPERIMENTAL RAP would have you believe JPEG is still at the top of his game and fully in on the joke.

What hurts JPEG’s recent claims about being top dog is that EXPERIMENTAL RAP isn’t very, well, experimental. Sarcastic fury on his past albums used to be paired with a sense of playful discovery, like the new wave synths mixed with punishing bass on All My Heroes Are Cornballs or the SP-404-shredding beats that powered his Danny Brown collaboration Scaring The Hoes. He’s no less agitated now than he was when the venom in his words grew most potent on 2021’s LP!, but there was still an outsider edge to his posturing, a hunger to jump on beats, to tease and threaten his adversaries in interesting ways. I lost track of how many times a song on EXPERIMENTAL RAP would start with a few bars of a vocal loop before JPEG charges in with the same triple-time flow, boasting the same knack for fucking on his rival’s woman before discarding her mixed with the same ire toward people who once wrote him off and the same tendency to couch it all in gun talk and just-hip-enough pop culture references. Whatever bits of introspection or self-awareness that colored his writing on I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU are mostly gone, replaced by punching down at no one in particular.

Now, he’s trying hard to get a rise out of anyone who would dare question his authority. “Don’t come to me with no goofy ghetto shit/I’m racist, and I don’t like that,” he hisses at the start of “GYBB,” chewing on the word “racist” for as long as he’s able. It doesn’t matter whether you actually believe JPEG is racist; he wants you to approach bars like this in bad faith, just like he wants you to clutch your pearls when he says the “little boys” making up his competition can’t touch him like Epstein on “Mask On” or the handful of times he wheels out more hackneyed winking jokes about rapping like Republican talking point du jour or how white women are better at sex. Structurally and thematically, the playbook couldn’t be clearer; it’s hard not to feel as though we’re watching JPEG plateau in real time.

This makes the handful of moments where he does push his pen more frustrating than they should be. Late highlight “Chat” isn’t a marvel just because he’s being vulnerable about his family life and re-emphasizing himself as staunchly anti-cop by shouting out Rodney Hinton Jr. and calling for the head of George Floyd murderer Derek Chauvin. It’s one of only a handful of songs where he switches up his flow, bending around guitar licks and blasting 808s with a staccato trilling between double and triple time. Here and in the opening seconds of “The 1st Amendment,” where he spends four bars finding ways to flip Charlie Kirk’s name into lethal puns, he’s been roused off his throne to say something, animating his otherwise stale rib-poking.

Increasingly petulant persona aside, EXPERIMENTAL RAP once again proves just how explosive JPEG is as a producer. He has an ear for when to blend the soft and serene with the harsh and chaotic, which has only grown more ambitious with age. All the hallmarks of his fusions are present—some gospel here, some guitars there, enough rap samples from across regions to make any blog nerd proud—but his pet sound this cycle is harsh electronic music. The inversion of the beat for “head,” which starts out with sparse notes and plinks before being swallowed by a wall of blown-out drums, and the frenetic IDM-punk fusion of “Since I Met Ye” are the most inventive moments on the album, stretching ideas he’s played with for years to their breaking point.

But even when he’s not altering the paradigm, his old beatmaking tricks are leagues more tolerable than the lyrical ones he continuously falls back on. His most intense beats pulse with urgency and dare you to either find a pocket to thrash in (“Meet The Dealers”), rap over (“Degenerates Prayer”), or ascend to (“War Over Land”). He pays academic reverence to old-school hip-hop by flipping a bar from Tennessee legend 8-Ball’s “Mr. Big” on “Mask On” and revving the Brenda Russell “A Little Bit of Love” sample that powers Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player” to racetrack speed on “Pop this Heat.” Ye also gets a few significant production shoutouts across the album, most notably refitting “All of The Lights” with hi-hats and screeching guitar on “Lights” and by repurposing the same cheering children sample billowing through Pusha-T’s “Numbers on the Boards” on “The Ghost of Emmet Till.” If nothing else, he regularly sounds like he’s having more fun reinventing things behind the boards than he does on the mic.

EXPERIMENTAL RAP has too many fun moments to write off as a bad album, but there are too few genuinely subversive ideas for it to live up to the earnestness of its title. Experimental rap is certainly being made today, but it’s not here. It’s hard to take anyone complaining as much as JPEG still does fully seriously when they’re opening for Linkin Park, making music with Flume and BTS, and are generally at the apex of their popularity. He’s now living up to the image Mooney exemplified in the most perfunctory way imaginable. White listeners and white supremacy are always ripe for a dressing down, but there’s no teeth or edge to his provocations anymore. The moments when he stops claiming an underdog status he hasn’t had for several albums now are when he remembers that art needs heart and fire to truly provoke.