good morning kanye shut the [ __ ] up there are very few figures in the music industry today who can match jpeg mafia's aggressive confrontational chaotic energy peggy is a rapper and producer whose diverse style takes influence from kanye bjork radiohead talking heads arca and even chief keith and he's become a massive counterculture punk icon in the last few years he speaks his mind and he pisses off as many people as he possibly can in the process while the unorthodox sound and anarchistic political messaging of his music is often compared to death grips peggy seems
to have carved a unique spot into the music industry with a self-made mix of futuristic industrial r b trap and noise sounds all with aggressive iconoclastic messages that pull no punches so how did this 32 year old man go from a career in the military to making songs with titles like i just killed a cop now i'm horny and i cannot [ __ ] wait until morrissey dies let's understand jpeg mafia [Music] barrington devon hendrix was born in 1989 in new york city he spent his early childhood in flatbush a racially and economically diverse neighborhood
in brooklyn thus produced many other artists like flatbush zombies joey badass bobby schmurda and also bernie sanders anyway when peggy was 13 his family moved to alabama then later to louisiana where he would stay until he enlisted in the air force at 18 years old he said in an interview a recruiter came to my school and i was thinking i have no other options i could either die here or at least i could get out of my situation so he did what he had to do and joined the military he was looking for a better
life and trying to find a way out of what he called a traumatic childhood according to interviews the military was a terrifying place for peggy he had no stake in the deadly war and in his words the military is a club of dick-swinging jocks even though he's been producing music as a hobby since he was 15 it wasn't until he was posted up in foreign countries with nothing but a computer and lots of down time that he really started using music to express himself peggy was stationed all over the world in kuwait germany japan and
north africa and even did a tour of duty in iraq you could probably imagine how those experiences informed or influenced the chaotic industrial discordant sound of his production in the air force hendricks was known for vocally speaking out against the toxic culture of the military now these confrontational tendencies may have isolated him at that point in time but they would later become a trademark of his music and the online persona we all know and love today peggy first started doing house shows and small performances while he was stationed in japan and he was using the
stage name devin hendricks it was the positive feedback that he got from these amateur performances that gave him the confidence to try and pursue music something he truly loved as a career traveling around the world for the military he ended up in a dark place mentally he talks about feeling alienated lonely he was in a place in a culture he clearly didn't belong in and this really does reflect in the sound of his early music he released four mixtapes during his time in the military and each one of them is a heavily atmospheric raw reflection
on where he was in his life the last of the four was goosebump it was a lo-fi experiment about which he said that was the most unconfident album i ever made it's all depressed and suicidal and i think it's the last time i ever dropped my guard on record [Music] [Music] in 2015 peggy was honorably discharged from the military but according to him the story is a little more complicated than that he said that his discharge was honorable only on paper obviously he can't share that many details it's probably classified but in a 2018 interview
he said that he was discharged for reporting an abuse of power and he was basically shunned by the people he knew in the military because he was seen as going against the code to report the kind of thing that he had reported he said this so whenever i see him the person he reported i'm going to make sure that i remind him what he did and remind him how it failed and remind him how much more successful i am than he is and i'm gonna make him feel like [ __ ] and hopefully they know
what it feels like what they did to me after leaving the military peggy moved to baltimore he took up the name jpeg mafia for the first time and he started dropping records almost immediately his first mixtape as jpeg mafia communist slow jams was a great introduction to who he was and what he stood for or rather against on pali an atmospheric track with a steel drum reverberating over the beat he raps i don't give two shits about crime bbq confederate flags in my spare time two glocks one big four-fifth put it to the neck of
every governor in office right out the gate his bitter anger towards racism injustice and the political system is coming through loud and clear in april 2015 soon after peggy had moved to the city freddie gray a black resident of baltimore fell into a coma and died after being transported in a police vehicle the incident resulted in massive riots throughout the city with dozens of arrests injuries and major property damage especially after his death was ruled a homicide at the hands of six baltimore police department officers this would serve as the inspiration for peggy's next mixtape
dark-skinned manson which was full of anti-racist messages with songs like cops are the target and i wipe my ass with confederate flags peggy talked about how he admired baltimore citizens and how they felt righteous anger and actually acted on it he said i respected that baltimore was like we're not gonna march we're gonna break [ __ ] because that's how [ __ ] gets done a year later around the time the 2016 presidential race was really starting to pick up peggy's identity as an artist was also starting to come together and he released his debut
album black ben carson named after the presidential candidate ben carson a black politician whose platform represents basically every idea peggy disagrees with he said about this album black ben carson is an amalgamation of all the records i've made so far communist slow jams was me confronting liberal racism and white supremacy dark-skinned medicine was me addressing those problems again but now speaking from the mindset of a baltimore resident during an uprising black ben carson is me squaring up to the established hierarchies systems and values with one hand on my 9 and the other on my crotch
black ben carson was a loud angry record it hits the listener with song after song of political messages and that same righteous anger from dark-skinned manson [Music] one of the tracks on the record i just killed a cop now i'm horny is one of peggy's most notorious songs and it generated a lot of controversy for an honestly horrifying sample in the intro he samples the death of a police officer caught on video in 1998 during which you can hear the screams of the officer begging for his life as he shot nine times with a rifle
it's a disturbing song and honestly there are still divided opinions on it to this day a lot of people think it's just inappropriate it's way more than it needs to be peggy himself spoke out against the backlash a few times on twitter one time he said none of you fake woke fake liberal white [ __ ] care about any of this you're disingenuous as [ __ ] and i'll continue to mock you musically until you die at this point in his career peggy was pretty much still an underground artist he was big in baltimore and
he was doing lots of shows but it wouldn't be until he moved to la two years later that he found a mainstream audience with veteran his second album recorded mostly in baltimore but mixed and mastered in california this album marked a change in tone for peggy's music he maintains the aggressively anti-racist messages and many of the political themes but his horizons were also broadening he said in an interview that he thinks veteran is just as much of a political record as black ben carson but he moved away from calling out specific people and more towards
large groups and this is true no one was safe when veteran came out alt-right neoliberals bloggers reviewers even drake for some reason and also morrissey from the smiths he was taking shots at everyone he even fired at brooklyn gentrifiers from williamsburg he was rapping you yuppies ain't real let you live for a fee we taking brooklyn back you can leave the coffee wait a second where are we recording this brooklyn brooklyn there's even a song named i cannot [ __ ] wait until morrissey dies because he can't stand morrissey's james baldwin t-shirts he takes shots
at one of his favorite targets the alt-right saying white boy is getting mad because of my content y'all brave on the web keep it in the comments this is one of the things that peggy does best he's knocking people off their pedestals relentlessly he sees the gentrification problem in metropolitan areas where black people get pushed out for 10 coffee and dog walkers he calls that out he sees morrissey being disrespectful to one of the greatest black authors of all time he turns that back on him he does it in an aggressive way but it's not
one that alienates the listener these are all good points that he brings up whether you agree with him or not he's saying some real [ __ ] i wrote a couple more notes on peggy's production that i wanted to share but i'm going to be recording in my bedroom and just reading off my laptop because i hadn't originally written these when we first went in the studio you know musically peggy is a genius producer to me you know i love the sound and texture of everything he creates especially knowing it all comes directly from his
imagination the thing is you know peggy's production as a whole um it's not easy on the ears these aren't pop songs these aren't pop trap songs these aren't drill songs the sound of veteran is coarse discordant it's industrial and intense there are moments of real listenable melodic brilliance i think dd form 214 is one of his best produced tracks it has those amazing ear worm sounds the intense drums it's mixed with a minimal rnb sample whole foods is intimidating and weird yet completely listenable overall i want to say the sound of veteran is like being
chased by a predator through a dark alley or something peggy's often struggling to be heard over the overpowering instrumental as it twists and turns like some you know sonic monster i kind of wonder if peggy's instrumentals are inspired by his time in the military the sound of ammunition the sound of um fighting in the distance maybe inspired the stressful tone of his production i don't know if that's true or not it's just an idea the thing about peggy's instrumentals in general is i do think he would be a lot more popular if his sound were
easier to listen to because the political ideas that peggy puts into his lyrics are you know it's pretty commonly held sentiments among young leftists but the thing is not everyone is going to be down to listen to those ideas if you also have to parse abstract combative beats if you do have a palette for this type of sound songs off a veteran like rainbow six panic emoji rock and roll is dead they have a very powerful imposing sound in a way that is uniquely peggy's so while his instrumentals may be hard to listen to in
the traditional sense they may not be they add an element to his music to the point where i think his sound would be incomplete without it they do add an element to his music to the point where i think his sound would be incomplete without it if he abandoned the aggressive fractured sound and went for a more commercial aesthetic i just don't think it would work i think for a lot of us we listen to peggy's music to hear what he has to say we're not necessarily looking to turn up although i have seen peggy
live back in 2019 i saw him with denzel curry in new york that was a great show the mosh pit was amazing but i do think listening to peggy day-to-day it's a bit more cerebral than it is visceral veteran catapulted peggy into fame it was something he had never experienced before it wasn't an entirely positive experience either as he illustrates with this quote imagine you've been doing something your whole life and one day all of a sudden a bunch of people who never gave a [ __ ] all of a sudden they super duper give
a [ __ ] it's like they think the art belongs to them they build narratives that don't exist they make up the intentions i have behind the songs and lyrics that don't exist he also said that you have to be mentally bulletproof to handle this level of attention for someone who puts so much of himself into his music i'm sure the sudden attention had to take some getting used to in the almost two years between veteran and his next project peggy would tour with vince staples work on music in la and end up making more
than 90 songs for his next album a lot of songs were made with little to no editing they were all done in one take he wanted it to be a much more raw project than veteran hype was high for this project people loved veteran and they wanted more luckily for peggy expectations were met september 2019 he dropped all my heroes are cornballs and it was immediately beloved by fans and critics the raw editing style comes through as soon as the first track starts with the sound of glass smashing and crowd screaming filling the mix beta
male strategies begins with a calming ambient vocal sample and slowly devolves into chaos eventually leading into that signature jpeg mafia type beat an aggressive noisy track less than a minute long that sounds like a straight out of a death grip's record the album as a whole is more musical than veteran and it also has less of a political overtone it still has the same unstructured kind of chaotic feeling but the pop and r b influences shine through a lot more like in free the frail which features peggy singing over a dreamy melody and crackling sound
effects the beat textures on the album are honestly pretty complex each song has many different layers of samples syncopated rhythms and strange otherworldly sound effects it's also less of an overtly political project at least when compared to his previous work when he was asked if real life had gotten too insane to make fun of peggy said at the end of the day no matter how much people are talking about it i'll say some [ __ ] about it if i feel compelled in other words yes i have run out of ways to say [ __
] donald trump all my heroes are cornballs feels like a moment of growth for peggy as it allowed him to diverge into more creative sounds and he was speaking less about politics which it seems like he wasn't really interested in anymore not that the political messaging held him back there's just more to peggy than attacking people who disagree with him this is one of my favorite things he's done so far the tracks are very unique melodic and some of them hit pretty hard it was also the first of his records to chart and debuted at
105 and critics praised it for satirical lyrics dissonance and consistent quality following cornballs peggy released a few eps but nothing major dropped until just recently when he released hands down my favorite project he's ever made lp dropped on october 22nd 2021 and it's the culmination of peggy's growth as a producer a writer and a rapper it maintains the classic chaos and aggression of a jpeg mafia album but it's calculated this time each song fluidly blends into the next they all have a unique sound and feeling that's vastly different from anything he's done before dikembe features
a beautiful bossa nova sample by stan getz and louise bonfa it adds synths percussion intense wrapping [Music] [Applause] hazard duty pay utilizes an immensely catchy classic r b sample with peggy rapping about how you won't get pushed around in the industry thoughts prayer is a spacey almost hyper pop track with autotune and a chorus featuring interpolation of britney spears hit me baby one more time overall lp is peggy's most colorful work yet and i personally loved it the quality and the creativity of his instrumentals has reached a breaking point honestly i can't imagine him topping
this it's just that good this is the perfect version of the style he's been working on for the last 5 years but lp faced some issues during its release as unfortunately not all the samples could be cleared including those on dikembe and hazard duty pay this prompted peggy to drop an online version on streaming services in an offline version with all the uncleared samples on bandcamp and youtube these are some of the best tracks on the record so it's unfortunate they couldn't be featured in the full release he ended a long statement on his bandcamp
with he ended a pretty long statement on his bandcamp with my time in the music industry is over because i refuse to be disrespected by people who aren't respectable in the first place the only ones i care about now and forever are you my fans i love you i love you and for you i will always be here this is the true lp and i hope you all enjoy jpeg mafia is one of those rare musicians whose work is incredibly honest he speaks completely from his heart and if that makes someone angry i don't think
he cares at all the thing about peggy being such an outspoken critic of the systems that governs society is that he knows just how bad society can be from his time in the military he knows firsthand he's not just some loser coming out of nowhere he's an actual veteran who's been to war and risked his life for his country and he came out on the other side feeling like that country doesn't care about him at all it's a pretty popular sentiment but he's one of the select few who's truly qualified to speak on it if
anyone has the right to criticize society it's him in a time when so many people just talk out of their asses studying on social media all day saying society should be this way that way peggy has the life experience to back up his statements even if he sometimes resorts to shock value to get his point across throughout history there have always been commentators satirists critics all manner of artists who even if they face criticism or punishment are determined to speak out against systems that they think are unjust or corrupt in the past peggy would have
either had his music banned he could have been imprisoned or in some periods of history he could have been killed by the government for saying the things he says today i don't think he has to worry quite as much but it's still important that someone is willing to say these things at all without true artists like jpeg mafia who are willing to tear down the flag and remind us of what it really is a piece of cloth what's stopping us from forgetting entirely this has been volksgeist thank you for watching hmm
