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4 hours ago
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As one of hip-hop’s most innovative outliers, Jpegmafia has come out tonight dressed like a bad guy in a western. All in black, including a cowboy hat and long leather coat, the maverick rapper swaggers around looking like the negative personification of Beyoncé’s glittery country takeover Cowboy Carter, which scooped two Grammys last week.
Jpeg’s music, though, casts him as a bad guy in a post-apocalyptic genre meltdown – one in which no sound is too weird to rap to. Aphex Twin beats and a wordlessly ululating male voice? That’s Real Nega, from Jpegmafia’s breakout 2018 album Veteran. Japanese advert samples and chiptune video game sonics? They feature prominently on Garbage Pale Kids, a brilliant cut from Jpeg’s collaborative album with fellow hip-hop left-fielder Danny Brown, Scaring the Hoes, which made many 2023 year-end lists.
As genre barriers come down across the industry, guitars have become increasingly prominent in Jpegmafia’s boundary-pushing output too. More specifically, they form the backbone of his most recent solo album, I Lay Down My Life for You (2024), just reissued in a bumper “director’s cut” version. Here are heavy riffs, buoyed up by innard-shaking bass and sledgehammer beats. Rap-rock has a deservedly knuckle-dragging reputation, but Jpeg’s shredding bricolage has much more in common with the mischievous extremism of hyperpop producers such as Sophie than it does with Limp Bizkit.
Undaunted, the crowd rearrange themselves into a series of moshpits – egged on by the man on stage, who, at 35, has come to terms with the fact that his cleverly deconstructed, polemical hip-hop draws a largely white, young male crowd. He’s leaning into it and will be supporting Linkin Park at Wembley Stadium this summer.
“This next song means ‘without fear’, Jpeg declares, introducing his 2024 track Sin Miedo. It explodes with a mixture of rapid-fire retro hip-hop samples, electric guitar hooks and lyrical grandstanding that resolves into a pumping club-music finale.
Next up is Don’t Rely on Other Men, which revolves around a sample from Succession – Brian Cox muttering “I hear you went down” – allied to thudding kick drum, church bells, found sound and a swell of guitar arranged like a string section.
Although parallels exist with fellow hip-hop-inspired noisemakers such as Death Grips and rapid-fire sample fiends like the late MF Doom, Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks pretty much occupies a hip-hop sub-genre all his own. Originally from Brooklyn, via stints in Alabama and Baltimore, and now based in LA, his stage name riffs on the .jpeg image file format and his fans call him Peggy for short – just one of the many amusing contrasts thrown up by his work. Whenever he grows weary of stalking around tonight, he retires to a large lectern decorated with a Jpeg logo wreathed by palm leaves, as though the rapper were heading some international agency.
Hendricks was honourably discharged from the US air force for reporting abuse. During his five-album solo career as Jpegmafia – more if you count the collaborations and emotional pre-Jpeg mixtapes as Devon Hendryx – it feels like this fierce artist now has all sorts of targets in his sights: other rappers, public figures, rightwingers, pearl-clutchers, phonies – and his own fans too. Veteran features a song called I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrissey Dies, just one early clue that Hendricks’s frame of reference goes well beyond hip-hop.
“First off, fuck Elon Musk,” Jpeg raps at the start of Lean Beef Patty, a Scaring the Hoes track that goes down a storm tonight. On inauguration day last month, he released a video for his track Protect the Cross full of flags, explosions and anger at white people not voting for Kamala Harris. The track is present tonight. “2025, your politics is a gang sign,” he spits derisively.
Although the surface impression of Hendricks is that of a noisy irritant whose tone and content are very online, his breadth of reference can be as dizzying as his fast-cut productions, from the NBA to Kenny Rogers. Accordingly, he released a pictogram-filled image of Protect the Cross’s lyrics last month that specified which lines were and weren’t Drake disses. (Other categories included “ask a black friend to interpret this” and “not about Taylor Swift”.)
If there is one drawback to tonight’s forceful performance, it’s that all the punitive maximalism irons out Jpegmafia’s subtleties and production nuance. The emotional heft in some of his work suffers too. There is only the briefest glimpse of his thoughtful side on Either on Or Off the Drugs, a bittersweet relationship song. Peggy may be angry, but he can be disappointed, considered and even lovelorn as well.
There are chuckles to be had, too, in how he rains down verse after scabrous verse, accompanied by the sort of noise that the Geneva conventions might deem in breach of human rights. But in between tracks, Jpegmafia plays the solicitous emcee, introducing songs, thanking the crowd for their support and throwing out water bottles. Most extreme of all perhaps, this contrarian covers Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe, completely straight-faced.
