Now, he’s trying hard to get a rise out of anyone who would dare question his authority. “Don’t come to me with no goofy ghetto shit/I’m racist, and I don’t like that,” he hisses at the start of “GYBB,” chewing on the word “racist” for as long as he’s able. It doesn’t matter whether you actually believe JPEG is racist; he wants you to approach bars like this in bad faith, just like he wants you to clutch your pearls when he says the “little boys” making up his competition can’t touch him like Epstein on “Mask On” or the handful of times he wheels out more hackneyed winking jokes about rapping like Republican talking point du jour or how white women are better at sex. Structurally and thematically, the playbook couldn’t be clearer; it’s hard not to feel as though we’re watching JPEG plateau in real time.
This makes the handful of moments where he does push his pen more frustrating than they should be. Late highlight “Chat” isn’t a marvel just because he’s being vulnerable about his family life and re-emphasizing himself as staunchly anti-cop by shouting out Rodney Hinton Jr. and calling for the head of George Floyd murderer Derek Chauvin. It’s one of only a handful of songs where he switches up his flow, bending around guitar licks and blasting 808s with a staccato trilling between double and triple time. Here and in the opening seconds of “The 1st Amendment,” where he spends four bars finding ways to flip Charlie Kirk’s name into lethal puns, he’s been roused off his throne to say something, animating his otherwise stale rib-poking.
Increasingly petulant persona aside, EXPERIMENTAL RAP once again proves just how explosive JPEG is as a producer. He has an ear for when to blend the soft and serene with the harsh and chaotic, which has only grown more ambitious with age. All the hallmarks of his fusions are present—some gospel here, some guitars there, enough rap samples from across regions to make any blog nerd proud—but his pet sound this cycle is harsh electronic music. The inversion of the beat for “head,” which starts out with sparse notes and plinks before being swallowed by a wall of blown-out drums, and the frenetic IDM-punk fusion of “Since I Met Ye” are the most inventive moments on the album, stretching ideas he’s played with for years to their breaking point.
But even when he’s not altering the paradigm, his old beatmaking tricks are leagues more tolerable than the lyrical ones he continuously falls back on. His most intense beats pulse with urgency and dare you to either find a pocket to thrash in (“Meet The Dealers”), rap over (“Degenerates Prayer”), or ascend to (“War Over Land”). He pays academic reverence to old-school hip-hop by flipping a bar from Tennessee legend 8-Ball’s “Mr. Big” on “Mask On” and revving the Brenda Russell “A Little Bit of Love” sample that powers Big Pun’s “Still Not a Player” to racetrack speed on “Pop this Heat.” Ye also gets a few significant production shoutouts across the album, most notably refitting “All of The Lights” with hi-hats and screeching guitar on “Lights” and by repurposing the same cheering children sample billowing through Pusha-T’s “Numbers on the Boards” on “The Ghost of Emmet Till.” If nothing else, he regularly sounds like he’s having more fun reinventing things behind the boards than he does on the mic.
EXPERIMENTAL RAP has too many fun moments to write off as a bad album, but there are too few genuinely subversive ideas for it to live up to the earnestness of its title. Experimental rap is certainly being made today, but it’s not here. It’s hard to take anyone complaining as much as JPEG still does fully seriously when they’re opening for Linkin Park, making music with Flume and BTS, and are generally at the apex of their popularity. He’s now living up to the image Mooney exemplified in the most perfunctory way imaginable. White listeners and white supremacy are always ripe for a dressing down, but there’s no teeth or edge to his provocations anymore. The moments when he stops claiming an underdog status he hasn’t had for several albums now are when he remembers that art needs heart and fire to truly provoke.
