Radical rapper Jpegmafia: 'Black people have things to be mad about'
It’s a balmy autumn afternoon and Jpegmafia is laughing about the many online, white alt-right men who seem to be triggered by lines such as “Pistol whip ’em, I can’t waste the bullet in a poser/Incels gettin’ crossed ’cause I crossed over/How they go from Anne Hathaway to Ann Coulter?”
“This shit be breaking niggas,” he says giddily, almost beaming with pride. “They be on Reddit spilling they feelings and shit. They can’t deal with it.”
While his flair for riling up online edgelords is a recent discovery, the 29-year-old rapper and producer has been tinkering with his sound for more than a decade. Last year he finally broke through with his album, Veteran, bracing noise-rap with a radical lyrical agenda, rife with references to anime and video games, and jabs at everyone from Donald Trump’s counsellor Kellyanne Conway to the television host and comedian Bill Maher. He has just released the more melodic, but only occasionally less aggro, new album All My Heroes Are Cornballs.
It is a left turn that is a stunning expansion of his punk ethos – pushing his anti-establishment rhetoric to the brink, promoting a DIY ingenuity, embracing the counterculture – and yet another provocation.
Jpegmafia was born Barrington Hendricks in Brooklyn, New York. In his song Williamsburg, Jpeg reprimands the gentrifiers taking over the borough: “We taking Brooklyn back/You can leave the coffee,” he snarls.
The irony of the fact that we are chatting in a coworking space in the Brooklyn area of Williamsburg called the Brass Factory, which has been converted from a real brass factory, is not lost on the rapper. His career has been about embracing contradictions, making noise music pushing a militant agenda of black self-defence to confused white audiences – radical rap to mosh to. Jpeg has been accused of being a troll or provocateur, but his rage raps are unambiguous about where his fury is from and where it is aimed.
“If you listen to my music, you know who I’m talking to, what I’m talking about, and exactly what my message is,” he says, wearing his signature black and red bandanna, combat boots and a T-shirt splicing the Gucci logo with the Rainbow Fish children’s book character.
“The only people who misinterpret it is goofy white niggas. People attach words like ‘edgy’ and shit like that to me. It’s like yo, when has it ever been edgy for a black person to talk about black issues? Just because I’m not doing it the way Common is, where I’m like, ‘Hug your mom’ and shit.” He pauses briefly, then smirks. “But also goofy white niggas come to my shows, so.”
Jpeg got the creative spark aged 12, listening to the Cam’ron album Come Home With Me at a friend’s house. “It had a chipmunk [sped up] soul sample in it and I’d never heard that before. It freaked me out. I thought it was the best shit I’d ever heard.” At 13, he was uprooted to Alabama, in the deep south, a jarring transition that provided an education in racism. “I had to deal with a lot of vitriol immediately,” he recalls. “It benefited me in a way because it just made me hard.”
To escape, he enlisted in the military at 18. He served one term in the US Air Force, during which he was deployed to Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, North Africa and Japan. He says being poor and black is all that prompted him to join up. “A recruiter came to school and I was like, ‘I have no other option, I can either die here or ... at least this will get me out of my situation,’” he says. “I’m not some patriot. I didn’t have some yearning to defend my country or anything. I was poor. And I was taken advantage of, really.”
He remembers his time overseas as “extremely scary” and the military as a club of dick-swinging jocks. A reluctant black soldier caught between the service arm of white American nationalism and its hatred of the Middle East, he describes serving abroad as “being swept up in some shit you didn’t start”. The military was isolating. “When they write their rules, they don’t think about black people, so it’s not meant for black people.”
He would never recommend it, but the air force reinforced his tireless work ethic. He had a computer and made beats in tiny spaces under the immense stress of intermittent combat. Deployed during the filesharing era, Jpeg had access to an endless cache of digital music but barely enough broadband speed to process much of it. He would spend whole weekends listening to anything he had managed to download: Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Wiz Khalifa’s Kush & Orange Juice, Rick Ross’s Teflon Don; Ariel Pink, country music. With an eclectic and voracious musical appetite, he started releasing music as Devon Hendryx in 2011. After a string of unsuccessful rap mixtapes, he turned to making lo-fi “freak folk” as Ghost Pop. “That’s the most unconfident album I ever made,” he says. “It’s all depressed and suicidal. That’s the last time I think I ever drop my guard on record.”
He cut his teeth doing live shows at small house parties in Japan. What little buzz the band garnered locally made him feel validated in his decision to pursue music.
Hendricks changed his name to Jpegmafia, moved to Baltimore and was there during a series of riots sparked by the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man who fell into a coma while he was being transported in a police van. “It was a ghost town. Shit was on fire. Cops were acting crazy. It felt like war.” The turmoil inspired his 2015 EP Darkskin Manson, with venomous songs such as Cops Are The Target and I Wipe My Ass With Confederate Flags.
Jpeg says he admired the righteous anger permeating the city. “I respected that Baltimore was like, ‘We’re not going to march. We’re going to break shit.’ Because that’s how shit gets done. That’s how America was started. No one is so nice that they’re going to listen to your empathetic views, especially not police that shoot 12-year-olds for having play [toy] guns. So there’s no reason to not turn up on people like that.” His music bristles with that same indignation.
Jpegmafia’s music began to resonate on the Baltimore scene, leading to the raving punk rap of Veteran. It only took him half his life but he is finally a professional rapper. “The reason I’m 29 and people are just now hearing about me is because there’s no bullshit,” he says. “I don’t have a manager who’s secretly on Interscope. I’m the complete opposite of an industry plant. I’ve been doing this since I was 15 years old and nobody cared till I was 28. If I was a different person, I’d be bitter, to be honest.”
He brings up Nick Drake, the singersongwriter who died aged 26 in 1974. “He died alone and a nobody. It wasn’t until 20 years later that people got it. Now there’s whole artists that sound like him, that have careers based off of his style. And he’ll never know because people couldn’t catch on fast enough.”
Fortunately for Jpeg, people caught on to Veteran and now, living in Los Angeles, the rapper is dealing with fame. The subtext of All My Heroes Are Cornballs is that every celebrity is human and will inevitably let you down. “It’s kind of like a baseline. Like, let’s get this out the way: All your heroes are fucking cornballs. Don’t put so much faith in these niggas you don’t know.”
He cites his own idol, Kanye West – who produced the Common song that inspired him aged 12 – but is reluctant to judge his pro-Trump pronouncements, warning that he may also, much to his chagrin, end up saying stupid things when he is 40. His message is not to put people on pedestals at all.
He has a note on his phone with random thoughts and songs that helped inspire the record’s energy, including the phrase “kill all snitches”, Smile by the Beach Boys, TLC’s FanMail, Everything But the Girl, Björk and, of course, Cam’ron. He denies there’s any sort of theme, but says the record is introspective. “I took that antagonistic figure I pointed at people and pointed it at myself instead,” he says.
“I wanted it to be more like centred around myself, so that if this is the introduction people are getting, I’m giving them the most honest thing right off the bat. So we ain’t gotta sign a prenup afterwards. You know what you’re getting into.”
Jpeg knows what it is like to be an outsider – in the deep south, in the military, as a rap oddity – and he knows what it is like to be justifiably angry. He wants his music and his shows to be outlets for those emotions. “Black people got shit to actually be mad about,” he points out. “A lot of these dudes in metal, they’re just mad at the world because, like … who even knows? But I want to create a space for these invisible black people – where niggas who have genuine shit to be mad about can come and be actually mad about it. I just want it to be communal: we’re all here and we’re all weird and we’re all, like, fucked up and depressed. Let’s, like, fucking rage, yo!”