Review Summary: Middle-aged men yell at Cloud
JPEGMAFIA doesn't want to pay $8 a month for Twitter. If you have never tweeted — twoot? twat? — this won't be life-altering news for you. If you are a verified Twatter, you still might wonder why Peggy chooses to instigate his dream collaboration with Danny Brown by hurling a big ol' Fuck You at such a Top-10-Most-Hated-Plutocrats-of-the-Decade candidate as Elon Musk. Wonder on, because his targets will only become more obscure from here on out.
SCARING THE HOES' narratives, or lack thereof, might indeed serve to frighten the skittish kind of hip-hop tourist who demands substantive poetry to make their minds swell with epiphany and their empathy expand to infinity. These people are hoes, and when the right/wrong sample on this project startles them into hitting the skip button, we need not mourn the loss of their attention.
Danny Brown is a big dog like Marmaduke. While he is less likely to reference web-adjacent murmurs of alleged coprophilia amongst certain well-off Emirates (don't ask) than his cohort, the pair agreed on Danny Brown's podcast that Brown is the more terminally online of the duo. Weighing their respective back catalogues against each other (think “Fields'' or “Scrap or Die” vs. “My Thoughts on Neogaf Dying (Radio Edit)” it's strange to think how each is
equally indebted to internet culture for the success they've experienced, as well as the consequential restoration of hair/teeth that had gone MIA after two respective half-lives lived at full-speed. Either way, with both a warm scalp and a full smile, Danny Brown comes in hot here, spitting wobbly globules of bullshit in the most entrancing manner imaginable.
I promise I'll stop pissing into the wind soon. The lurching mania of the reviews already put forth by my critical compadres have confirmed my bias that this is music for degenerates; nobody on our side of the picket line has sobered up since the release of
SCARING THE HOES. From this we can deduce that the album is not only a raging success, but also a representative and catalyst of Dionysian delinquintism.
Naturally, there are modes of analysis that can capture this visceral miscreance in all its glory. Buried in robertsona's probably-inebriated musings is a fascinating link between Harold Bloom's notions of true interiority as weighed against Danny Brown's life/performances – this saga has taken a (hopefully) hopeful turn as Brown announced his intention to try rehab (in surreal fashion) as he was just about to perform “Dip” at a showcase gig for Doc Martens. Meanwhile, where many are rightfully praising JPEGMAFIA as one of the best producers (and most certainly samplers) in the game, he was recently heckled at a live show about the mixing on
SCARING THE HOES, and is currently embroiled in a
Veteran-era sample crediting issue with one Chef Warren, which has painted Peggy in an ugly light so far. I'll be careful to say too much there lest I wind up an oddly specific track title, but suffice it to say that these parasocial figures of online 'success' are suffering for their art.
Fortunately that art is unbelievably fucking dope, and that's mostly because of the significant drawcard of this production: the production. Peggy tells us that these beats were made over the course of a year in which he constrained himself to the use of an SP-404 sampler in order to recreate the difficulties of 90s producers because reasons? Well, somehow this constraint has resulted in the leanest and meanest tracklist of his career, a nasty needle brimming with outsider bullshit that should be obnoxiously slammed at every substance-fueled orgy this year, whether hoes are present or presently leaving. While they'll probably stick around when NSYNC, Michael Jackson, and Kelis are being flipped, a loop from a commercial for Japanese seafood titans Nichiro or an obnoxious Dirty Beaches sample might just displace the hoes entirely. Fortunately, you'll be left with the real ones, and somewhere in between bass stabs that are either a perfectly juxtaposed gut-punch or a surprisingly melodic antipode to a chaotic sample, someone might clarify a lyrical reference that nobody else caught, and you'll all have a big emotional drunkblurt before you sloppily clap cheeks.
Just to clarify, the lyrical content of
SCARING THE HOES consists of more than all of the Twitter beefs you never knew existed — it's also a tableau of every rap cliché you've never heard of. There is a level of hip-hop reflexivity here that I haven't heard since
RTJ4. Difference being, where Run The Jewels scare the hoes with their moral grandstanding (just [mostly] kidding, they're dope), JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown scare the hoes by being genuinely unusual artists who aren't afraid to revisit the time that Canibus inferred, quite literally, that he'd eat the ass of an MC that he was supposedly dissing at the time. With this established, nothing is sacred: Peggy jokes about Freddie Gibbs getting beat up; a clever reference to the passing of Trugoy the Dove is squawked out by Danny; two tracks are just straight up named “Run The Jewels” and “Jack Harlow Combo Meal" (lol); and Jesus LL Cool J lovin' Christ, do I really need to bring up sampling again? This is starting to feel like citing individual figures in a Bosch painting to try and draw on wider themes; just zoom out and peep the fucking carnage — listen to this goddamn album.
Perhaps my sputnik-based delinquents in arms were onto something;
SCARING THE HOES is not an album that benefits from analytical observation. It sounds best at full noise, and, played in its most suitable biome (revelry in any given climate), its weaknesses become its strengths. Oh, you don't understand the lyrics? It's just a reference to professional wrestler The Iron Sheik; don't worry. Excuse me, you're having trouble hearing/deciphering Danny Brown? Listen to the hook on “Burfict!” and try telling me that anything matters beyond
that voice ripping
that flow over
them horns. Let it all out. Expound on every microscopic conniption
SCARING THE HOES quickens within your hateful soul. It's okay, I'm here. I might be a bottle of pinot or two deep, and I might struggle to hear you over the damaging decibels that have been radiating from my residence for almost a month straight, but I promise I'll do my best to consider your feelings and hash out some kind of slurred understanding. What I can't promise is that I'll remember it tomorrow.
