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Don’t Rely on the Strength of my Image: Bricolage and Postmateriality in JPEGMAFIA

By Eric Tyler Benick.

JPEGMAFIA performing, photo by Levi Manchak via Wikimedia Commons.

“I frequently provoke hostility in those whose social comfort requires my conformity to stereotyped social categories. Because they rarely question the veracity of their own preconceptions, I must be prepared to disabuse them, in order to avoid serious and irreversible misunderstandings.” 

-Adrian Piper 

“I’m direct because people aren’t” 

-JPEGMAFIA 

I am standing in front of Rothko’s “No. 16” in the Museum of Modern Art listening to JPEGMafia’s “Free the Frail.” What will come of this experience will most likely be conflation, but I am amused by the strange connective tissue of conflation, even if it is tacky and weak. In Rothko, so much of what intrigues me is what comes through the nebulous density of the paint, how materiality is always present, how paint is never trying to be not paint. With Rothko, the material is the subject, and material, on its own, is an expressive modality. When I look deeply at a Rothko, his forms, his use of material, I think of the final stanza of Frank O’Hara’s poem “Why I am not a Painter.” 

But me? One day I am thinking of 

a color: orange. I write a line 

about orange. Pretty soon it is a 

whole page of words, not lines. 

Then another page. There should be 

so much more, not of orange, of 

words, of how terrible orange is 

and life. Days go by. It is even in 

prose, I am a real poet. My poem 

is finished and I haven’t mentioned 

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call 

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery 

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES. (O’Hara, Frank. Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. New York. Knopf. 2008)

For O’Hara, the subject of his language is addressed just as directly as the subject of his friend’s painting—they both reach beyond the conditions of their materiality. The materiality of O’Hara is not the color orange, but the word, the signifier of “orange” as a material experience. How orange feels is equally as important as what orange means, and, further, what orange doesn’t mean. The material absence of the subject becomes the subject itself, but the material isn’t even absent, it is recodified by O’Hara directly in front of us: “There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life.” Orange becomes an operative paradox, a modality for expressing whatever form it should hold. Orange is both “not orange” and “how terrible orange is—” the material thingness of orange is the modality of its wonder; its malleability, its intoxicating function. 

Rothko, Mark (American. 1903-1970). “No. 16 (Red, Brown, and Black).” 1958. Oil on Canvas. Photo from MOMA.

So when JPEGMafia croons “Don’t rely on the strength of my image” through a bricolaged soundscape in front of an enormous wall of Rothko, I can’t help but think of O’Hara’s oranges, how the reliance upon image is a failed starting point. The image is nonmaterial. It is the subjective impression of the material, but it is not fixed, it is signified. JPEGMafia (or Peggy, his nickname by which he will be referred for the rest of the essay) may be referring to an image of self, of character, of authenticity, of voice, but these are all also artistic investigations. When Rothko painted a red rectangle, the rectangle was not the point. Shape, just as image, is an arbitration of the materiality of form, it is fixed, sure, in its position, but it should not be relied upon as the container of meaning, just as O’Hara’s oranges are both themselves and completely not themselves, and are, furthermore, containers for other selves.

I arrive at this idea of the postmaterial through artists such as Adrian Piper, a central figure in New York’s conceptual art world, to denominate a subversion of form for the effect and interpellation of what is being transmuted. Adrian Piper said, “Ideally the work has no meaning or independent existence outside of its function as a medium of change” (Moten, Fred. “Black and Blur”. Durham, NC. Duke University Press. 2017). This is a simple function—change. To Piper, the materiality of the work is irrelevant and serves as little more than an arcane point of reference. Meaning is altogether inconclusive and unimportant. What is of importance is what is carried through the work via the kinetic, transitive properties of the essential. In Rothko, the paintings are cohered by their blur of space and object, a base layer of material always discernible as a subtext, paint not as a means for supplement, but as an (inter)action. In Peggy’s work the mission of the beat is not groove, but an arrhythmia through which the subject can be its most examined—at once pejorative, polemical, tender, and inscrutable. 

During William Pope.L’s notable crawls through New York City, the subjective materiality is at once the clothing he wears (in some cases a dirtied, black suit; in others, a Superman costume with a skateboard on his back), the political experience(s) of his own body, and the harsh infrastructure of the city itself (the streets, the cars, the garbage, the sewage, the rats, etc)—but still there is more, because the material is also Pope.L’s exhaustion, the sweat rolling down his face, the further wear of his clothes, the exasperation of his emotional state, the cuts and bruises he collects, the expression on the faces of witnesses, the heat rising off of the street. Materiality is a convergence of means for the work to take place. It is both conditional and integral. It is arbitrary and specific. The composition is not beset by an alteration in material conditions, rather, it is made by them. Accident and error are just as important to the composition as what is deliberate.

Pope.L on one of his “Crawls” through New York City. Photo from the New Yorker, courtesy of Mitchell-Innes & Nash.

I think of Pope.L’s crawls when I listen to Peggy’s “Baby I’m Bleeding,” wherein the speaker seems to also be moving through subjective states of political retribution. 

Ooh, I’m up in Brownsville, strapped with a Kimber 

All you yuppie purses getting swiped like Tinder 

Now I’m at the White House, looking for your President 

Hop out the van, pointing guns at your residence 

Ooh, I’m up in Queens now, showing y’all a body 

Hoping that you pussy ass try and find me 

Chains on my body, looking like a rapper 

Acting like a slave when I’m gunning for my masters. 

Peggy’s approach is admittedly more militant than Pope.L’s, but his voice, his emotion, his palpable exhaustion echo the down-and-out function of Pope.L’s body dragging the hot concrete, analyzing the connections of place, identity, and access. What feels consistent is the subjective materiality of the body as a weapon against systems of oppression, Peggy transporting his form to take aim at political leaders and the upper-middle class while also drawing a distinct connection between the subjugation of Blackness and the inevitable resistance against the oppressor. 

In a segment for MoMA, Pope.L recounts the conditions of his performance as such: “So I realized that I was setting up a tension when I crawled about being in space and how you’re located in that space and you’re supposed to behave in that space and who can own that space and how you can own it” (Pope.L on His Crawls: Magazine: Moma.” The Museum of Modern Arthttps://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/337). The politics of the work are both implicit and unintentional. The use of Pope.L’s body as the material of investigation is not meant as the subject of spectacle, but more as a kind of vanishing point, or what Fred Moten might call a “blur” between subjectivity and the conditions of subjectivity. The “crawl” was not a self-portrait, it was a landscape, at least in generic terms. 

What Peggy does with composition is similar to Moten’s idea of the “blur” in that it is not autobiographical, it is not confessional, and, like Piper, it is not really important that it be about anything. The aboutness is in the happening. The aboutness is situational. The aboutness is circumstantial. If there is a deeper subjectivity being examined, it is being done through the blur of the material conditions that created/oppressed/liberated it. The access to subjectivity is not narrative or direct. It is circuitous. It is, often, not a language at all. 

What intrigues me about Peggy’s work is the flood of sound that obscures the language from being immediate or discernible. Typically, Hip-Hop is centered around a prowess of lyricism. Rappers are elevated and crowned based on their abilities around rhyme, meter, metaphor, polysemy, cadence, and entendre.  Golden age New York rapper Rakim (referred reverently as “the God MC”) is typically cited as the father of modern rap for his predilection to internal rhyme and breaking up the monotony of end rhymes (enjambment). Rakim is essentially the first rapper (at least in any popular sense) to treat his bars more like a poem. He recognized that breaking a line early or carrying a line over can offer multiple interpretations. Rakim’s groundwork as a lyricist is present in almost every rapper after him (Peggy included). Yet the strength of Peggy’s vocal approach relies drowning out the clarity of the language (thus obscuring the vehicle of subjectivity) for a mix that more deeply infuses and draws out the disparate materials of composition. 

Hip-Hop is, at its foundation, a work of bricolage. It’s what makes it modern. It’s what makes it avant-garde. The beat and break of Hip-Hop relies upon the compositional materials of vinyl sampling, electronic drums, live instrumentation, “found” soundbytes and elaborate mixing. In this way it belies previous modes of music-making as it is almost entirely composed of preexisting materials, thus calling into question the authenticity of an originary sound. When Afrika Bambaataa lifted the melody from Kraftwerk’s “Trans-Europe Express” for his 1982 song, “Planet Rock” he was not inventing anything, but exploiting a new context of materiality; namely, that ownership is a farce—that all sounds simply exist as a shared space, as a shared context. 

The sample is pivotal to composition. The sample is allusion. The sample is anaphora. The sample is both break and melody. The sample is the undercurrent between modalities. In Hip-Hop, causality and connection don’t require justification, they just occur. They are real because they can be witnessed. They are real because we feel it. Material and evidence are tautological, a double ouroboros. Hip-Hop is constructed with the ghosts of past occurrence. Its material is the evidence of what has existed before, which is the evidence of what exists in the present.

With Peggy, this ghostliness is a ghastliness. Most compositions are opened abruptly with a frantically whispered, “you think you know me!” The composition is intentionally noisy and disruptive, or, rather, ruptured. What is discernible in language is being shown through the rupture of sound. In “Beta Male Strategies,” off of the humorously titled All of My Heroes are Cornballs, an uncanny voice loop muffled in watery static reveals Peggy’s polemic. Peggy, nearly mumbling with a mouth full of what feels like the inexpressibility of language, braces us with his thesis: “Ain’t no details (nah), ain’t no conversations (nah)/ain’t no real money in rap (shut up), it’s all retail (facts)/it’s all outrage (for real).” Peggy is using the materiality of his medium to address materiality itself. Peggy’s argument is both nondiscursive and nonmaterial.  Peggy’s use of sound is to speculate against the material suppositions of culture, that mobility is attainable, that all making is for the end goal of a “product,” and that such modalities are problematically validated by their inherent profitability. 

In thinking of the work of Adrian Piper, Fred Moten asks a series of questions regarding materiality and arrives at a perspective of sound and being: 

Can we so easily separate visual singularity from visual pathology? Can singularity ever be singularly visual? Might it not be necessary to hear and sound the singularity of the visage? How do sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundary of the visual? What’s the relation between phonic materiality and anoriginal maternity? If we ask these questions we might become attuned to certain liberating operations sound performs at that intersection of racial performance and critical philosophy that had heretofore been the site of occlusion of phonic substance or the (not just Kantian) pre-critical oscillation between the rejections and embrace of certain tones. Sound gives us back the visuality that ocularcentrism had repressed. (Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pg. 235.)

Similarly, Peggy’s work appears to reach beyond these constraints of ocularcentrism. In blurring the function(s) of sound and image, Peggy suggests that maybe there is an inherent synaesthesia to making sense, that the materiality of making sense is a conundrum. “Don’t rely on the strength of my image,” Peggy reminds us, asking that we not settle for or condone a limited dimensionality. 

Peggy understands this conundrum well and uses his keen visual scope to establish a pretext to his sound work. On the cover of his 2016 album Black Ben Carson, Peggy stares into the camera stoically in front of a confederate flag while a young woman next to him laughs (what seems like uncontrollably) into her hand. The juxtaposition of stoicism and humor in the face of historical oppression is emblematic of Peggy’s position to ridicule the ugly truth from within its own absurdity. Here is the third verse to the eponymous track: 

My wife ugly, and you know that

Should’ve got a white girl, and you know that

Right wing, right wing—I own that

From the DOW to the NASDAQ—I blow that

Money, money make the world go ‘round, bitch

I’m Ben Carson, I’ll make these girls go down

I’m the man, understand?

The cover image for “Black Ben Carson,” photo from JPEGMAFIA’s bandcamp.

The irony is immediate in the title, which is an effective use of revoking identity/agency. Peggy delegitimizes Ben Carson of his Blackness (which is to say his social/political/ontological currency) with his use of a seemingly redundant modifier. The word “Black” is used as both addition and negation, as a complexity and a simplification. To reiterate blackness in this instance is to insinuate or presuppose a lack of it. (As opposed to Black Moses, Black Thought, ALLBLACK, Black Joe Lewis, et al. where Blackness is renominated/doubled so as to increase its meaning/efficacy/carrying.) Peggy is adopting the Ben Carson persona as much as he is excoriating it, like putting on a second skin only to tear it off. 

The titles of Peggy’s songs carry their own kind of attack, humor, and velocity. “Digital Blackface,” “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny,” “Beta Male Strategies,” “I Cannot Fucking Wait Until Morrisey Dies,” and “Life’s Hard, Here’s a Song About Sorrel” are all particularly great examples of Peggy’s ability to be both direct and arch, to present a sophisticated understanding of subversive humor so infrequently seen in music (lest it be parodic) without some pretentious or pedantic follow-through. I am reminded again of O’Hara, his smart and acute titles: “Having a Coke With You”, “Meditations in an Emergency”, “Mary Desti’s Ass”, the aforementioned “Why I Am Not a Painter.” I think of an imaginary relationship between the two, that the poetries are linked in their (more or less) direct treatment of the subject. One is never uncertain what a Frank O’Hara poem is “about ” and the same is true with Peggy. By making “aboutness” attainable, the material is able to transfer. 

Peggy’s “aboutness” is a synthesis. It is the tension of a direct subject run through the meat grinder of sonic manipulation. It is the paradox of a bifurcated identity, so that sincerity and irony are at a war for interpretation, though this seems of little importance to Peggy himself. Peggy’s “aboutness” is not the material of the language, or the material of the music, or the material of the image, but the conglomerate weakness of all three on their own. Peggy’s “aboutness” is in the making and the live delivery of the made (which is a making revisited by performance) and not in the integration of the material— “if it’s good, then it’s good, break it down, this shit is out of my hands,” he instructs us. It is not that Peggy’s work is free of interpretation or radically against interpretation, but cognizant that interpretation is often lethargic and misconstrued, and so neglects any refracted responsibility of interpretation. 

Perhaps it is helpful to think of Peggy’s world as a liminal one between the shadow world of “meanings” and the literal one set before us. And although we know, somewhat empirically, that this world is our only world, we still exist dually and duplicitously between experience and meaning. I picture Peggy like a renegade boatman between these worlds, sloughing the useless modifiers/materials/signals into the fetid water, and shouting the most obvious threat directly into our faces. 

Is the response to the depletion of interpretation a kind of imaginarium? A willfully naive postulation? A complete abnegation of correctness? Can we placidly exist in the liminality of making and meaning? O’Hara, I believe, was doing this when he wrote “Why I Am Not a Painter.” And Rothko when he put shape to canvas. And Pope.L when he crawled through Times Square. And so when Peggy croons the lyrics to “Hit Me Baby One More Time” on “THOT’S PRAYER!” we are reminded of the fissures of this liminality. The original saccharine is bled out for a raw expression compounded unironically by its reference. The effect is different even though the material is the same. Peggy knows this is the point. He knows because he exists in this imaginarium. He knows that interpretation doesn’t serve him—and that it doesn’t serve us either. He knows what Sontag knew and so does not dictate or delineate expression, but lets it run free in its flaw and (dis)honesty. The blur is the meaning, the making, its own point.

Works Cited 

Jablon, Samuel. “William Pope.l on ‘Acting A Fool’ and Alternative Futures.” Hyperallergic, 14 July 2015, https://hyperallergic.com/221452/william-pope-l-on-acting-a-fool-and-alternative-futures/.

JPEGMafia. All My Heroes Are Cornballs. EQT Recordings. 2019. 

JPEGMafia. Black Ben Carson. Deathbomb Arc. 2016. 

JPEGMafia. LP!. Republic. 2021. 

JPEGMafia. Veteran. Deathbomb Arc. 2018. 

Moten, Fred. “Black and Blur”. Durham, NC. Duke University Press. 2017. 

Moten, Fred. “In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition”. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press. 2003. 

O’Hara, Frank. Selected Poems of Frank O’Hara. New York. Knopf. 2008. Pendleton, Adam. “Black Dada, A Reader”. London, UK. Koenig Books. 2017. 

“Pope.L on His Crawls: Magazine: Moma.” The Museum of Modern Art, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/337. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Tyler Benick is the author of the forthcoming collection of essays, Softly, as if I Played Piano in the Dark (General Antagonism, 2023), the chapbooks I Don’t Know What an Oboe Can Do (No Rest Press, 2020) and The George Oppen Memorial BBQ (The Operating System, 2019), as well as a founding editor at Ursus Americanus Press, a chapbook publisher. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Oyez Review, Southeast Review, Bat City Review, Armstrong Literary, Washington Square Review,  Bodega Magazine, and elsewhere.

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