Hip-hop in 2019 has become the new pop music. Trap beats with repetitive loops and meaningless lyrics are what’s playing on the youth’s radio while they’re driving to school. It’s what’s plugged into the auxiliary cord while teenagers are partying. It’s what fills the Spotify playlists that these kids listen to on the daily. In 2017, we saw the rise of SoundCloud rap, proving that anyone can be a musician these days. While some music critics view this as a bad thing, I like to look at in a different way; the more, the merrier, right? Every once in a while a gem that thinks outside the box can be found, and today I’ll be talking about a gem I found myself, JPEGMAFIA.

JPEGMAFIA, also known as “Peggy” by his core fanbase, is a rapper who offers experimental hip-hop and makes it sound good. While JPEGMAFIA does make Trap music, a hip-hop subgenre that’s notorious for lazy lyricism, he offers a completely different sound that separates himself from his fellow trap-rapper peers. I want to focus on his second full-length album titled “Veteran”, which was released in January of 2018. I plan to talk about the vocal content and the hectic production to show just how unique this project really is.

Watching Peggy in interviews, he seems like a relatively laid back person; however, his lyrics don’t support this statement at all. JPEGMAFIA’s aggressive attitudes clearly stand out throughout the whole 47 minutes that his album offers. While this is not uncommon in hip-hop, the way Peggy goes about the shots he fires is so blunt and straightforward that his anger transfers through to the audience. Peggy pokes fun at SoundCloud rappers, alt-right white supremacists, and violently shares his personal political views. Peggy’s versatility is especially apparent on the track titled “Thug Tears”. He goes from singing to yelling to talking, in a calm manner, all while rhyming in a matter of about 30 seconds. On “Veteran”, JPEGMAFIA showed no fear in confronting everybody and everything he has a problem with, but what makes this project a true experimental album, is the production.

“Veteran” is entirely produced, mixed, and mastered by JPEGMAFIA himself. While the beats for tracks like “Baby I’m Bleeding” and “Macaulay Culkin” sound relatively standard and grounded, you also have beats like the ones on “Whole Foods” and “Rock N Roll Is Dead” which sound completely surreal. Not only are a majority of the beats loud and boisterous, but Peggy uses a variety of samples that many wouldn’t consider to be instruments. On “Thug Tears”, a clicking sound that keeps popping back up throughout the track can be heard, which turns out to be a quickly looped sample of Peggy clicking his pen. On the second track of the album, Peggy samples a strange croaking sound that can be emitted from the back of your throat. The way JPEGMAFIA is able to use these sounds and turn them into music on this project is phenomenal.

“Veteran” by JPEGMAFIA could potentially become a classic album. His vocal delivery is versatile and raw while his production pulls from sounds you wouldn’t expect to sound good, and makes them sound good. Peggy uses the trap sound that’s popular today but takes a different approach, which makes the album stand out. JPEGMAFIA is starting to gain traction, which raises the question, could this be what future trap music sounds like? In the midst of the boring pop music that dominates the charts today, JPEGMAFIA’s “Veteran” offers something new that is in my opinion, one of the best projects released in 2018.