JPEGMAFIA, the trickster king of experimental hip hop

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desi Sting fan club. Every other conversation I wandered into revolved around the 72-year-old former The Police frontman, people discussing their wishlist of Sting songs or having serious debates about how to make sure they get a good spot up front for his set. Even the usually gig-hardened and cynical music biz people backstage sounded positively giddy with Sting-mania.

It was all a bit much. Especially since there was only one visionary, genre-blending musical alchemist on the lineup that day, and it wasn’t the geriatric crooner with a penchant for smarmy, bloodless ballads and a fetish for Tantric sex (seriously, look that up). No, that title goes to 34-year-old Brooklyn rapper-producer JPEGMAFIA, one of contemporary hip-hop’s most potent disruptors, and probably its most lovable terminally-online weirdo.

Ever since his critically acclaimed 2018 sophomore album Veteran, Peggy—as he’s known to his fans—has been at the abrasive, eclectic cutting edge of experimental hip-hop. His compositions are a firestorm of jagged shards of broken sound and implausibly twisted samples, occasionally leavened by moments of staggering melodic beauty. They’re held together at the seams by the sort of charismatic, trickster-God energy that can get a crowd full of Indian indie heads to mosh to an a capella rendition of Carly Rae Jaepsen’s Call Me Maybe, bodies slamming into each other in ironic euphoria.

Peggy’s mission statement—the musical framework under which he operates—is pithily summed up in the title of his 2023 album with fellow iconoclast Danny Brown, called Scaring The Hoes. He makes gleefully party-killing music, brimming with aggressive swagger and free-wheeling experimentation. It appeals to the type of music nerd who gets