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Peggy has always been forthright. Anyone who’s fraternised with his music could tell you that just from the first few bars of any given track. His inability to mince words has been one of his greatest strengths, and has given him a freedom with his commentary that would be the average rapper’s downfall. It has its drawbacks though, as it means that the Peggy package also arrives fit with a healthy dose of hubris, more about that soon. His largely leftist inclinations were easy for people, including me, to get down with. ‘Veteran’ was not short on jabs at the alt-right, internet edgelords, fence-sitting liberals, pearl-clutchers, you name it. Unfortunately for Peggy, the exact people he tends to despise are precisely the listeners who have been consistently drawn to his work in the first place. Pasty, chronically online dweebs who often reflect JPEGMAFIA’s typically conditional wokeness and adversarial nature back at him. In reaction to this, he’s taken it upon himself over the years to work a healthy dose of black supremacy into his subject matter.
This has started to backfire on him though. Recent friendliness with prominent Nazi Kanye West has called into question whether he truly cares about championing black people in his art, or whether he’s merely spouting these ideas as a means of deterring his majority white fanbase which he loathes. It undoes years of apparent connection and care for the black community, and his reaction to the backlash has been simultaneously saddening, yet unsurprising. Playing the race card to shield from his tone deafness, appealing to his idolatry for West’s music as though that automatically makes the association okay. Even within the album itself, he can’t seem to steer away from corny statements about his superiority over the people who fund his existence. His insecurity shows *most* when he’s self-aggrandising about how much money he makes, staying above “ghetto shit” in the most smug monologue in a song since maybe Drake’s outro on ‘The Heart Pt. 6’. The quantity of money you possess is not some mark of your inherent value as a person, and the fact that JPEGMAFIA brags about his bank account with such sincerity tells me that this is a lesson he is yet to learn.
This is also indicative of the other, more separate problem in his music of the growing inability to hone his best traits into a balanced collection of songs. Even the best moments of ‘Experimental Rap’ sound more like someone imitating JPEGMAFIA’s heaviest moments than they do him. He’s slowly narrowed all the room his productions once contained down to a homogenous noise beating. He’s failed to diversify his flows beyond his incessant triplet cadence, which further blurs each moment together. Lastly, as has been mentioned already, his lyrics have mostly just become a one-dimensional smattering of vaguely misogynistic, braggadocious, myopic confrontation and a self-fellating sense of status in underground hip hop. The uncomfortable truth for a lot of Peggy listeners has been realising that he was always susceptible to these attitudes. His aforementioned hubris was always due to consume his image eventually, and his music has suffered relatively as a result. For every quote-unquote banger present in the mix, a lot of which just sound like leftovers from his ‘I Lay Down My Life For You’ era, there’s a track or a moment that highlights just how in the trenches JPEGMAFIA is mentally. He is far from his best here, and seems lost on how to actually express himself without wandering into self-parodic territory.
Dan Will Review 