On the cover of their collaborative album, Danny Brown y JPEGMAFIA they appear as anti-heroes armed with guns and bibles. Portrayed in typical blaxploitation film style, the two rappers are the epitome of cool—clad in suede suits, accompanied by two bombshells, and with police looming on the horizon, close enough to suggest danger, but not close enough. enough to inspire panic.
Upon cursory listening, the connection between “Scaring The Hoes” and these ’70s B-movies might seem far-fetched: nothing about the project screams “retro” (although, admittedly, it’s not a particularly futuristic album either, it sounds more like something ripped from some strange, distant dimension in which our linear perception of time is both wrong and useless because everything is happening at once). Anyone even remotely familiar with the tone of these films and with Brown and JPEG themselves, however, could draw the line between the two: they are niche and irreverent, they perfectly understand the rules of the media with which they play and they have no qualms. to bring a torch to them.
From the first second of “Lean Beef Patty”, main single and theme that opens the album with a very accelerated sample of “I Need A Girl (Pt. 2)” de Diddy, “Scaring The Hoes” is an adrenaline rush, a turbulent and fast-paced car chase in the underworld. Speed is a key element of the project, and although it is usually supersonic, as in the fragments of Kelis’s “Milkshake” that crackle under the bombed terrain of “Fentanyl Tester”, at certain times JPEGMAFIA (full producer of the album) suddenly slows down, savoring the whiplash caused by the abrupt change.
They are not isolated occurrences: in “Scaring The Hoes” dissonance and sudden turns reign: the title track builds on saxophone howls and an ominous handclap that seems to come from the opposite end of a long corridor; two Japanese advertisements introduce “Garbage Pale Kids” and they continue to play during a chorus composed solely of a grungy guitar solo and percussion reminiscent of a pickaxe banging against the walls of a mine; during his initial minute, “Burfict!” it hints at being the most conventional track on the record, with a combination of snares and a brass loop, but it succumbs to the cacophony before the second verse. Often the sounds weave in and out of frequency so haphazardly it almost seems like an accident, as if this were a project conceived out of interference (camera flash on “Shut Yo Bitch Ass Up/Muddy Waters”the notification of a message in “Orange Juice Jones”), or are stacked on top of each other with no clear hierarchy, a superimposition of consecutive nightmares.
In the midst of the chaos, rapping is often thought of as almost incidental or secondary, but in moments when Brown’s nasality or the usual bitingness of JPEGMAFIA snatch a close-up, one remembers precisely why they are sovereigns of experimental hip hop: their flow-switching is agile and virtuous as they battle invisible enemies and rave about cocktails whose polytoxicity (“Is it the ket, the meth, the weed, the lean, the molly, the boy, or the blow?”JPEG is interrogated in “Fentanyl Tester”) would impress even William S. Burroughs. Throughout the album, the silhouettes they draw with their verses are enormous and cartoonish, as if the duo were walking through the hall of mirrors at a macabre fair.
On paper, an overdose of energy like that of “Scaring The Hoes” It can feel exhausting, but surprisingly, the intensity is as overwhelming as it is addictive. The fuel that JPEGMAFIA y Danny Brown have poured into this album seems inextinguishable: it is regenerated with each listen, with each noise crash new sparks jump, it is impossible to look away from such a forest fire.
Ultimately, entertaining as it is to try, any attempt to describe the genetic sequence of “Scaring The Hoes” it is almost as ineffective as trying to communicate the logic of a dream to someone outside of it. This is a product as original and irreducible as the two geniuses who conceived it, and as is usually the case with states of intoxication, one has to experience it first hand to understand it.