Unlike JPEG's understated last album, LP! (which he also produced, mixed and mastered himself), Scaring the Hoes is defiantly garbled, turning a squawking Dirty Beaches outtake into a brutalist rap flamenco on the title track or giving lounge-room jazz a raver feel on "Jack Harlow Combo Meal." All the while, its co-stars negotiate these set pieces like action stunt doubles, crashing through everything in their path with aplomb.Ĭollaborations are often about compromise or competition. 2)," NSYNC's "Gone," Kelis' "Milkshake," the anime The Vision of Escaflowne, a tourism commercial for Hokkaido - often morph to reveal a secondary form like a shonen protagonist. The vocal flips, sourced from across an eclectic soundboard - Diddy's "I Need A Girl (Pt. The samples sound distorted, out of focus. JPEG produced the album on the SP-404, a sampler that has become a favorite for producers at live shows, and it gives the music an almost collage-like texture. In this case, the pulp indicators are digital: the Nextel chirp and the default iMessage notification tone, Nintendo and Sega video game sounds, clips from obscure YouTube tutorials. But the music is even truer to the hallmarks of those movies: independently produced, conspicuously low-budget and gleefully transgressive. Their mission is laid out flat on Scaring the Hoes' title track, with Brown pantomiming the breathless exploitations of a money-grubbing music executive: "Said it ain't about the bars 'cause it's all about the brand / Say it ain't about the art, 'cause it's all about the fans / Give a f*** about a fan, put the money in my hand." In response, the pair of MCs agree to embrace the pejorative as a challenge, delivering a hyperactive album that is as gratifying as it is overloaded, a truly jarring and yet refreshingly in-your-face display of restorative rap that refuses to go unheard.īlaxploitation is a familiar influence for both JPEG and Brown, and the album's cover art invokes those aesthetics with a direct tribute to the 1973 film Sweet Jesus, Preacherman. But on their new collaboration, it's clear the two rappers see that innocuous plea to simply let the Rap Caviar playlist run as something more sinister: a capitulation to homogenous, mass-produced music, fodder for revelers who couldn't begin to care about the form. JPEGMAFIA and Danny Brown are easy first-round picks for this category - craft-first eccentrics with singular catalogs that demand some recalibration of the ear. Born from a meme of existential non sequiturs, the distinction is less about what women might actually enjoy listening to casually and more about guys missing common cues, not understanding that there is a time and a place for a specific kind of artist, one that might disrupt the natural flow of a gathering, or worse: something so intrusive or annoying that the most important patrons might leave. To play Death Grips at the function is to scare the hoes. More broadly, the phrase has evolved into a euphemism for any rap considered unfit for a party or similar social setting. On the rap internet, "scaring the hoes" has become code for a certain type of hip-hop: anything abrasive or weird or super-lyrical, designed for repeat close listening. Rappers Danny Brown (left) and JPEGMAFIA embrace their abrasive sides on Scaring the Hoes, a joyously chaotic collaboration glued together by JPEG's collage-like production.
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