"You think you know me"
Disclaimer : I don’t endorse and am not paid by any of the people i link to, i just wanna draw connections, not justifications.(yes, this is about genius.com)
Buttermilk Jesus : smooth preacher of his own Word, ordering you to pray in his RnG ballad-bangers. the instaslut façade, selling out while staying the same, just revealing what was inside the veteran all along, How do you stay yourself when your self keeps climbing away? [TFW you’re blessed but don’t feel like you deserve it.]
Any rise to fame is the accumulation of momentum and expectation, it is but the prerequisite for falling. Building a house is setting up an eventual ruin.
stacked with clout, Twitter-verified, dressed in a thousand veils he’ll shed in his many thirstposts, “no scrubs” on his tinder profile, Amen.
Free The Frail : Peggy’s most open, honest artistic statement about the craft of making art and living as an artist. JPEGMAFIA speaks of the stress of seeing your life change too quickly.
finish the thing, leak it/the work is frail but finished.
Rains of static shower his voice without making him illegible, stress on his mind, losing hope.
Suddenly, it all stops to let a soft beat and melody introduce themselves with and through Peggy’s voice : “don’t rely on the strenght of my image hey, if it’s good then it’s good break it down, this shit is out of my hands”
Thoughlessness in release.
Informational chaos of static resumes. With it arrives m(ayb)emories of the army, of a dangerous life at least.
He admits his strange parcours and ascension, and points to his peachy success while calling out to the ubermasc competition of the rap game, its misguided hopes.
The static flows like an anti-bass before letting go into the chorus, holding hands with the humming of Young Emoji(?).
This is letting go and knowing that this too shall pass.
“Quicksands, too thick to stand”
Ugliness repeated///broken sounds rearranged into breakbeats : peggy lays out an oeuvre of erroristic sedimented sonorities that courses through noise, Rap, RnB, lofi contemplative music, Soul, anime outros etc…; his synthesis is a retell of RnB into RnG : Rhythm N Glitches.
Where emotions are displayed on top of sonic-landscapes of distortion and delay, patchworked textures of static, clicks and ticks, bubbling sounds, screams and sighs. Pegster’s voice floats and passes through the different levels of sound, it is as much an “instrument” as the rest of the instrumental, it’s implemented into the very fabric of the beat.
In other words, the beat-making of jpegmafia allows for a very personal, self-generated noise tailored to his voice, playing with it in a way you wouldn’t hear a rapper/producer collaboration generate,
the Dilla-ness of approaching sampling as a collage of errors
Add to that the obvious artificial(human-made) nature of noise music, the feeling of listening to something that couldn’t possibly have occured irl/meatspace; not in a forest or on a beach, only throughout a monitor, an amp, out of a speaker.
“Authenticity” is not here, there’s no attempt at boombapping the masses or imitating animal-generated sonorities, it’s all about that delay, that reverb that fade-in, that layered cake of sounds and samples. Peggy’s hidden razoblades in the cream.
Addendum: Precursors to RnG in Peggy’s repertory are DD form 214(for the glitched-out introspective tone), GhostPopTape(for the lofi texturing) and the 27 Club(themes)]
[DD Form 214: probes the depth of Peggy, looking at what bubbles, ticks and clicks inside, the internal struggle of “petty pay”, hollow tasks and low stakes. It is all the melancholic energy of AMHAC minus the blues of Going Big : success and scrutiny.]
[GhostPopTape: the faults in the work give an authentic/crafted/lived feeling to the work (the texture of lofi is derived from the sound of degraded files/stored content, it is the sound of degradation, the timewounds unto the medium) lofi musictrends express an aesthetic of decay]
[The 27 club : "heroes will fail you”]
when skins meet : Fucking someone (up) in rap
That process generally involves bringing together the aesthetics of aggression in sex to the aesthetics of aggression in fighting. In Rap it necessarily invokes the nigger-image of the black body as violently active and actively violent ; prone to all things libidinal. (That specific Thug-as-street-beast delusion of white sensibility is taken up at the same time by gangsta rappers and transformed into a modern/personalised robin hood aesthetic matrix. Itself derived from the Mack/Dolemite, pimp-folk-hero archetype, the one who provides for his fam/community “thanks” to crime.)
Peggy takes the usual threats and sexual innuendos of the braggadocio rap tradition and mixes up perspectives : Enactor and affected, masculine and feminine, top and bottom, doer and done.
Likewise, the album bakes aggression with introspection in a way that /mostly/ doesn’t seem hetero-geneous or forced,
-the outbursts of Buttermilk Jesus in JFMIAAT, subsumed by the piano and slow drums
-the twofaced kenan and kel
-the smooth fading of JPEGMAFIA TYPE BEAT into Grimy Waifu
-Post-verified Lifestyle’s false start that mutates into a smooth anxiety-ridden ballad
Repeated listening is an imperative for any sonic work that doesn’t try to make its audience comfortable ; an album that edges you to the peak of a conventional song structure before pulling the rug from under your feet : there’s a masochism to the appreciation of this kind of “hard to listen music”, a coming-back to certain knowns will reveal the known unknowns lying underneath, unconventional structures let themselves be (p)recognized through repetition, familiarity with the chaos allows the listener to create maps of feelings in their sensible mind to find their way around the sonic landscape.
That said this specific albums is both composed of very autonomous tunes but can also flow like a continuous composition.
Gender as infrastructure : Gender is either an immobile essence/axis whose shape depends on the social circumstances it manifests itself in/through or it is a morphing egregore that takes root in the technosociological capability of humanity to complexify social relations.
Regardless of your position on the essence(or lack thereof) of gender it obviously subsumes the social realm, even people existing/becoming outside of it still have to graple with it, whether in their relations to binarists or to the physical manifestations of Gender : being nearly omnipresent, Gender has infrastructural properties.
Restrictions on abortion procedures affect a transversal subset of the binary gender-system: transmen, nonbinary people, intersex people and ciswomen are affected by it. Prostate cancer risks/“epidemic” stemming from medical bias as well as individual shame affects transwomen, nonbinary folks, men of all sexual orientations, intersex people… All these affective measures and more impact people in different ways depending on their position at the intersections of gender, class, race, neuro/physio-ability etc.
Fashion affects every body.
Sex and gender, as spectral categories, manifest themselves in complex arrays of phenotypical and genetical traits, gender as a seemingly supplementary generator of categories and dynamics necessarily complexifies the obvious conclusions of binary sex as a scientific colonial category. It is impossible to establish a fixed map of these experiential and institutional categories but tracing somebody’s quick moves through the architecture can be interesting.
JPEGMAFIA moved away from a Wagecuck, thug-lite, anxious black artkid, ain’t-shit-nigga aesthetic to a “off-to-get-some-backwoods”, broke exmilitary, shitposting, low-effort-goth onto a self-fashioned idol, a bald diva, a muse of its own inspiration. An aunty-looking revelation.
Now ; The notion of infrastructure implies movement and creation/generation, it also implies maintenance and hacking.
Every structure can be hacked into
Where drag artists could be seen as gender-designers, making gendered and ungendered constructs out of archetypes, traits, aspects, impressions, references of masculinity, feminity and their hyperbolised occurences ; Peggy scratches the surface of braggadocious black maskulinity, its hypersexuality, its violent activity and actively violent image ; not quite a destroyer or designer, more of a detourneur.
After all, the queerness of peggy’s presentation is not an assault on duality, only a blurring of the binary : (I think he’s less likely to (have) come out as nonbinary than as a power bottom). The queerness of his presentation is an attack on the manhood of his haters.
it doesn’t have the perfectionist pull of (fem) drag performing where every details builds up a hyperfeminine figure as a way of communicating intent (parody, homage, copying, pastiching, replicating, covering) ; JPEGMAFIA’s mixing up of classicaly feminine and masculine attributes is always obvious, no attempt at diverting attention from a part of the body, only at pointing the finger at a certain angle, the way the shoulder is revealed by a falling dress, the way in which eyes are covered while hands clutch textile ; peggy’s a diva, not a queen.
“what is up with you and these thots ?”
How to think the thot, be the thot? What is the thot-becoming?
The “Thot” as the spoiled brat, the rich girl findoming over her fans, edging her stalkers with tales of the legendary private snapchat, denying her number to scrubs, businesswoman manager and artist all in one, “can’t be commodified if you sell out first”.
Thot as object-subject, the commodity that thinks itself, the product that elevates its own standards and prices, true freelancer life.
Thot-Tactics : adopting the perspective of specta/c/tor of your own success.
E-girl Peggy : If we take Fashion to be the aestheticization of failure then the Thug Poet 2Pac as a rap icon is the failure of white capitalism’s attempt at bringing down the black man figure to the level of inhuman worthlessness, then Siouxsie Sioux was a failure of the suburban aspirational white middle-class matrix to make another seemingly normal girl next door. Any fashion statement is an attack on pre-established norms :
-Goth-fashion as a rejection of vitalism and an embrace of grief through the omnipresence of Darkness in clothing (note to self: write article about whiteness in goth and the zombie of western culture)
-(street)Punk as an embrace of proletarian functional workclothing, embracing the classist filth-stigma attached to poor people by the bourgeoisie, devolving later on into the creation of new uniforms, away from the biracial roots of both skins and punks, getting nazified, americanised, crusted, segmented.(and hardcore-d)
-Bosozoku as the veteran workingclass japanese masculine being fused to motorcycle fetishism ; riding helmetless, torso bandaged underneath adorned Tokkō-fuku, red sun like a target on their forehead. Kamikaze Aesthetics. Born Cannon fodder for the war of/on speed.
-skangers, chavs, roadmen, gopota, wesh are all stylised visions of the young lumpenproletariat, kids sitting on the corner. Tracksuits and cheap beer, haschish and scooters. The failure of society to integrates the yung lumpenproletariat in its so-called meritocracy and its subsequent failure to lower them down into complete invisibility. Hence the turn of this youth towards the anonymising potential of tracksuit/”urban camo”/athleisure/ there’s an obvious overlap and extension to hooligan culture here and sportsfan shit/ and most importantly footgear.
Is success a failure of the underground artist ?
What good is success in a space like the music industry but what good is making music if you can’t feed yourself ?
What does it say about your work that this is the kind of system that wants to get you in ?
What the fuck can be done ?
Away from classical masculine presentation(as fetishised bougie respectability or chameleon clothing), away from oldhead-stroking hippity-hop callback, away from gangsterist assimilatory rebel aesthetic, Jpegmafia is now a lipsy, easily angered, parading-posing, androgynous, emotional wreck of quick wits and double entendres, in other words, Peggy is a villain (by disney’s standards at least)
And what is a villain but the failure of their world ?
PS:
-Any connections to the slice of life genre?
-sh/c/ould i write about trauma in siouxsie’s catalogue?
-(an)aesthetic linguistics of lean rap!
Send songs to ospare@substack.com / Next one in two weeks, not promising anything so you won’t be disappointed if it’s small