All My Heroes Are Cornballs - JPEGMAFIA (2019)
a run through four decades of the hip hop underground
One of my many little obsessions in music is what I sometimes call “metamodernism” or sometimes just “the new thing”: music by and for people have never known any boundaries on genre or era.
JPEGMAFIA is, as far as I’m concerned, the king of whatever this new thing is. He has forged his own path, with his own sound and his own oddball sense of humor. Each project he releases tends to be wildly different than the last, with the connective tissue being his own hands-on, backyard workshed approach to building tracks from samples, beats, live instruments, and random noise.
This early record is heavily influenced by the trends of hyperpop and vaporwave and broken transmission and all the other below-the-surface new music that lives on Soundcloud and Bandcamp and Youtube rather than record label back catalogs.
While his craft would improve and sound more conventional over the next few years, his wild originality is still intact.
