Hey, at least it's less overdue than last time? Whatever, it's still really good and worth your time. Next up... see, a lot of projects dropped, but I have no idea what I feel like covering given how underwhelmed I feel about that new Chelsea Wolfe. So it might be Resonators coming soon, or perhaps a review - stay tuned!
I don't think JPEGMAFIA is interested in making this easy. See, if he was he probably would have followed his controversial breakthrough Black Ben Carson by leaning into the politically charged, internet-rooted aggression and commentary that shocked so many people, especially given how well it was balanced with some real self-reflection... but that's not really what his 2018 follow-up Veteran was. Oh, the commentary was mostly there but sliced to ribbons along the way, showing an increasingly fragmented, almost stream-of-consciousness approach to his bars and production that was certainly experimental, but didn't quite pack the same impact for me as the more tightly composed moments. Certainly inventive and challenging and any insight I was able to glean did stick in my memory... but even being late to the party by over the year, I found myself wishing that I liked it a lot more than I did. And thus when I heard that All My Heroes Are Cornballs was continuing down a similar rabbit hole, with JPEGMAFIA seemingly very much aware that his new album might disappoint fans looking for more the provocation even as the buzz suggested he was looking to embrace more melody and singing... hell, I was at the very least intrigued, so I figured I'd be a little more on the ball with this and dig into the project. So what did JPEGMAFIA pull out here?
A little late posting this, but I will say that I'm grateful for all of y'all who have stuck around to read and follow this - thanks again! Next up, let's knock something out of my backlog before I start with the week ahead, so stay tuned!
Well, this won by a landslide this year. Seriously, it was not very close whatsoever, the only close competition had about half as many votes and that was Twin Fantasy by Car Seat Headrest - don't worry fans, I'll be handling the next Will Toledo album when he puts it out, I've just never been all that interested in covering a remake of a project I heard years ago. But in a sense, I'm a little baffled why I didn't cover JPEGMAFIA early in 2018. I think part of it might have been rooted in how the Patreon scheduling got out of hand and I just couldn't find time to tackle it - one of the reasons I did shelve it for 2019 but may bring it back in the future with a little more containment and structure - but for another, what I did heard of JPEGMAFIA I was more wary of than outright positive. Because I actually did go back to his earlier projects and my issues weren't due to the experimentation - taking a slightly more jagged, offkilter approach to slightly more conventional tones adjacent to an act like clipping - but more to the content, which seemed to land in a strange sort of very Internet/meme culture political provocation, which meant that certain points of insight and transgression struck some weird notes, at least for me; definitely an acquired taste. And that's not even getting into the messy controversy surrounding his now infamous song 'I Just Killed A Cop Now I'm Horny', in which actual audio of a policeman being killed was mixed into the song and which requires a pretty layered conversation surrounding transgression, art, and the modern cultural role of police that probably deserves to come up at a later date. And when you factor in some structural issues and a hit-and-miss record for hooks or groove, I can see how his first two projects - Black Ben Carson and The Second Amendment - might not have gotten the same universal acclaim that Veteran did two years later, although I would say Black Ben Carson has a certain nightmarish, amorphous quality that reminds me of B. Dolan's The Failure - and I intend that as a compliment, I do think it's a surprisingly compelling and pretty great album. But from the outside, Veteran did look to be the most streamlined project to date and certainly getting the most critical acclaim in experimental hip-hop, so I was open to this kicking ass: so how about it, going back to 2018, was Veteran worth it?
