#barrington devaughn hendricks

[hotdogmexicano]

I did some alternate edits for JPEGMAFIA's I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU album art.

[fangomusic]

JPEGMafia and Danny Brown, Scaring The Hoes

New music Wednesday

Twenty years of experimental hip-hop clash on this album and it immerses us in a colorful digital universe with their trademarks, a hyper-detailed production technique and those rapid-fire attacks on posers and twitter critics. The surprising, bombastic production continuously keeps you on your toes as bass-boosted percussions cut through sped up pop and soul samples.

[luckycloud808]

JPEGMAFIA by James Emmerman for Document Journal. December 11, 2018

[thebowerypresents]

JPEGMafia Gets the Weekend Started at Music Hall of Williamsburg

JPEGMafia – Music Hall of Williamsburg – November 8, 2019

Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks, more commonly known as JPEGMafia, or to his fans as Peggy, took the stage on Friday at Music Hall of Williamsburg utterly alone. Artists performing today operate under extreme austerity—streaming services have Hoovered the money that was once available to musicians selling their work and labels own their masters, leaving touring as the last bastion in which they can truly seek to earn a living. So when JPEGMafia marched up to his laptop, triggered his own visuals and his own beat, one could be forgiven for assuming it to be a reaction to the harsh reality of performing in 2019. But Hendricks has always been alone: He produces his own beats, writes his own raps (“I started rapping because nobody liked my beats,” he told Genius) and even mixes and masters all of his music. (“Why the fuck am I gonna pay someone $2,000 to make it sound like shit? I can do that myself.”)

He is himself, and the freedom that that gives him is apparent: JPEGMafia is an artist utterly indifferent to genre, or really any kind of line that defines what should or shouldn’t be done. He’s part of a new and somewhat ignored regime of black queerness, dedicated to simply doing whatever he wants. This is in his lyrics, in which Hendricks’ identity is mercurial, a terminally online troll transforming at will and hardly with a real form. Onstage he was likewise a blur, glistening with sweat until he became a beacon of light, a being of pure energy. The music is chimeric, too: memory collages that purr and snap and spontaneously produce sing-alongs of TLC’s “No Scrubs,” smearing reference and originality together into a continuous splotch of mind goo.

The result is a sound that is distinctly JPEGMafia but radically inclusive: audiences moshed deliriously, and were ravenously hospitable to the opener, Butch Dawson, and a surprise guest, a new rapper named Ghost. The show ended with an audience that had just seconds previously been tearing one another apart to JPEGMafia’s fury moshing to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” with beaming faces. —Adlan Jackson | @AdlanKJ

Photos courtesy of Andrew Pintado | www.drewmartinphoto.com

@drewmartinphoto