“Scaring the Hoes” by JPEG Mafia & Danny Brown
An eccentric hip-hop outing from two of the genre's most intriguing voices.
Hello! 😊👋
Welcome to a new edition of the Daily Music Picks newsletter!
Today’s music pick is a manic, strange slice of underground hip-hop, featuring two of the genre’s most original voices going full tilt.
Genre: Hip-Hop, Experimental
Label: AWAL
Release Date: March 24, 2023
Vibe: 🤯
Some albums offer up one or two intriguing ideas and wrestle with them over the course of 40+ minutes. Scaring the Hoes, the outstanding collab between Flatbush rapper/producer JPEGMAFIA and Detroit emcee Danny Brown, leaves the ideation fire hydrant on full-blast for its entire running time. The sample-heavy rhythms lean on everything from kitchen utensils (”Garbage Pale Kids”) to hand claps (the incredible title track) to a well-placed Kelis vocal (”Fentanyl Tester”), all to dizzying effect. These are bangers that grab you by the shirt collar and refuse to let you go until the last track screeches to a halt.
This record is also a terrific showcase of the easy chemistry between the two iconoclasts at its center. Brown’s trademark nasally flows glide easily over the jagged edges of JPEGMAFIA’s beats, dripping with as much knowing snark as technical brilliance. It’s all in service of subverting hip-hop’s norms and, to a degree, how the genre tends to market itself overall. Take a track like “God Loves You,” which flips the gospel-infused rap trend on its head while Brown gets off hilarious one-liners like: “Sit on my face/I wanna speak in tongues.”
Just like the saying referenced in the album’s title, JPEG and Danny don’t take themselves too seriously. Instead, they opt for masterful chaos, at times daunting but never not exciting.
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