Now, he\u2019s trying hard to get a rise out of anyone who would dare question his authority. \u201cDon\u2019t come to me with no goofy ghetto shit\/I\u2019m racist, and I don\u2019t like that,\u201d he hisses at the start of \u201cGYBB,\u201d chewing on the word \u201cracist\u201d for as long as he\u2019s able. It doesn\u2019t 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 \u201clittle boys\u201d making up his competition can\u2019t touch him like Epstein on \u201cMask On\u201d 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\u2019t be clearer; it\u2019s hard not to feel as though we\u2019re watching JPEG plateau in real time.<\/p>\n
This makes the handful of moments where he does push his pen more frustrating than they should be. Late highlight \u201cChat\u201d isn\u2019t a marvel just because he\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u201cThe 1st Amendment,\u201d where he spends four bars finding ways to flip Charlie Kirk\u2019s name into lethal puns, he\u2019s been roused off his throne to say something, animating his otherwise stale rib-poking.<\/p>\n
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\u2014some gospel here, some guitars there, enough rap samples from across regions to make any blog nerd proud\u2014but his pet sound this cycle is harsh electronic music. The inversion of the beat for \u201chead,\u201d 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 \u201cSince I Met Ye\u201d are the most inventive moments on the album, stretching ideas he\u2019s played with for years to their breaking point.<\/p>\n
But even when he\u2019s 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 (\u201cMeet The Dealers\u201d), rap over (\u201cDegenerates Prayer\u201d), or ascend to (\u201cWar Over Land\u201d). He pays academic reverence to old-school hip-hop by flipping a bar from Tennessee legend 8-Ball\u2019s \u201cMr. Big<\/a>\u201d on \u201cMask On\u201d and revving the Brenda Russell \u201cA Little Bit of Love<\/a>\u201d sample that powers Big Pun\u2019s \u201cStill Not a Player<\/a>\u201d to racetrack speed on \u201cPop this Heat.\u201d Ye also gets a few significant production shoutouts across the album, most notably refitting \u201cAll of The Lights\u201d with hi-hats and screeching guitar on \u201cLights\u201d and by repurposing the same cheering children sample billowing through Pusha-T\u2019s \u201cNumbers on the Boards\u201d on \u201cThe Ghost of Emmet Till.\u201d If nothing else, he regularly sounds like he\u2019s having more fun reinventing things behind the boards than he does on the mic.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> of its title. Experimental rap is certainly<\/a> being<\/a> made<\/a> today<\/a>, but it\u2019s not here. It\u2019s hard to take anyone complaining as much as JPEG still does fully seriously when they\u2019re opening for Linkin Park<\/a>, making music with Flume<\/a> and BTS<\/a>, and are generally at the apex of their popularity. He\u2019s 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\u2019s no teeth or edge to his provocations anymore. The moments when he stops claiming an underdog status he hasn\u2019t had for several albums now are when he remembers that art needs heart and fire to truly provoke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Now, he\u2019s trying hard to get a rise out of anyone who would dare question his authority. \u201cDon\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":701012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[342,49,48,75,343],"class_list":["post-701011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-albums","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/701012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}