Where’s the Beef?
The dark web’s two favorite oddball rappers team up for an album that is the weirdest from either’s respective catalogues. But the match is one made in glitch-hop heaven, providing us with some of the most bizarre, masterful, and flawless underground sounds ever produced by an SP-404.
SCARING THE HOES
JPEGMAFIA x Danny Brown
Experimental Hip Hop
To start: I generally lack the vernacular required to discuss hip hop or rap in depth (see: using the word “vernacular”), and usually just end up sounding like a dork, but when something as extraordinary as SCARING THE HOES comes along, you figure it out.
Danny Brown has long been a favorite of mine, since XXX debuted in 2012 (Jesus, 11 years ago), his inimitable voice was constantly being paired with beats that could only generously be called “challenging.” After 2013’s Old launched him into the rap stratosphere with more mainstream hooks from songs like “Dip” and a feature from Charli XCX, Brown went full avant-garde nihilist with 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition. That album contained some of the most creative—and ear-punishing—beats I’d ever heard, seemingly so strange and off-tempo it would be impossible to rap over them effectively. But Danny found a way, and in doing so made Atrocity Exhibition one of the best albums of the 2010’s.
JPEGMAFIA on the other hand, has his roots more in the soundcloud scene: ultra-experimental, harsh beats, and a delivery that combines the surreal with the too-real for a futuristic, if noisy, experience. His run around the turn of the decade, with 2018’s Veteran, 2019’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs, and 2021’s LP!, made Peggy a career out of being over-the-top, yet immensely talented. His ear for bizarre samples and DIY approach made him a hero of the terminally online generation.
That these two should ever meet was once just the stuff of science-fiction, like asking “what if a planet randomly appeared and crashed into the Earth?” Yet, as the teasers began to appear a year ago, and singles began to drop, it became the stuff of a Dali-esque dream/nightmare (depending on your perspective).
SCARING THE HOES is cosmically chaotic, beyond even my wildest imagination. Peggy has produced the album entirely himself, creating beats from some truly out-there samples using only a Roland SP-404 workstation, which is the equivalent of attempting to play a Tchaikovsky ballet using the soundcard from a Commodore. The result is mind-blowing, energetic, and at times, almost psychedelic.
The album starts fairly lo-fi and frankly unassuming, until we reach the title track, which explodes in a wash of blurry saxophone samples and massive bass hits, perfectly complementing Danny Brown’s verses commenting on the hypocrisy of mainstream hip hop, delivered at a rage-temper he rarely displays. Peggy’s chorus of “Stop scaring the hoes / We don’t wanna hear that weird shit no more,” is the topic statement of his entire career, paradoxically concluding “how the fuck we supposed to make money off this shit?”
The album only gets…stranger from there. There’s a song called “Jack Harlow Combo Meal,” which is hilarious in itself, but that it features some of Danny’s fastest- and Peggy’s loudest delivery over a loop of pleasant lounge piano will most likely disturb you. And the closer, “Where Ya Get Ya Coke From?” could easily find itself on a Death Grips album, with it’s towering, distorted hook sample matched with a simple woodblock pattern during the verses. Brown finally brings out his most off-kilter delivery, rarely landing on any sort of beat, his lines sounding more like a forensics debater using the spread. Then it all just…cuts. The end.
Whether rap is your thing or not, you should give this a shot, if for no other reason than the LOLs. It’s noisy, it’s energetic, it’s random, it’s raw, it’s humorous, hateful, and hedonistic. I am absolutely not qualified to describe the experience of this album any further, so, I’ll leave you with a quote from the great Anthony Fantano: “this [album] is definitely leaving the hoes scared, and maybe even scarred.”
