Permission
to Preach.
Why JPEGMAFIA made me cry at the gospel sample, and what avant-garde rap teaches a 2-month-old rapper learning his wave.
2019—2021
How Peggy found me
It must have been somewhere in 2022 or 2023 when I stumbled upon Peggy's music — and I'm extremely glad I did. I'd seen his name floating around for months on different corners of YouTube and the rap-internet underbelly, and I assumed, as I usually do when something gets hyped, that he was going to be another generic mumble rapper. Some guy with a face tattoo and a producer he didn't pay enough.
I was wrong. Profoundly wrong. I clicked on "Hazard Duty Pay" mostly out of obligation — to confirm the dismissal I'd already prepared in my head — and instead, the gospel choir samples cracked something open in my chest that I didn't know was sealed shut.
I broke down in tears. Right there, headphones on, in whatever Brisbane room I was sitting in. The beauty of those samples layered against the rage in his delivery — it wasn't aggression for aggression's sake, it wasn't shock. It was a man preaching. A wild-as-fuck dude with rockstar energy delivering the most experimentally true rap structure I'd heard in years, because he does it all — or most of it — by himself. The producer, the writer, the engineer, the performer. One man, one vision, no apologies.
Raw, untapped power. Lyrics that aren't afraid to say fuck you or fuck off in the most heartfelt manner — toward being true, open, and honest. That's the part that hit me hardest. Peggy isn't angry the way internet angry men are angry. He's angry the way someone who actually loves the world is angry — angry that the world keeps making it hard to love it back. And he uses gospel samples to remind himself, and us, that the love is still there underneath all the noise.
The bars, the beats, the ROCKSTAR energy
The tracks below are the ones that shaped how I hear his catalogue. Each one is a different door into the same house — start with whichever pulls you, but know that every track is teaching you something different about how to be honest in your own work.
- Extremely dirty, old-VHS camera filter on his music videos — him dancing exactly like his live performances, no rehearsed angles, no smoothed-out edits. Pure documentary chaos. ROCKSTAR AS FUCK. HOLY SHIT.
- Adlib placement — as if God woke him from a cave and he had to preach to the world before sunrise. The adlibs aren't decoration. They're the actual sermon underneath the verse.
No complaints
in terms of what rap, in its honest form, is.
What it does to me
It's the gospel samples that always get me first. Every time. There's something about hearing a choir — voices that were originally raised toward heaven — chopped into a beat about hazard pay and survival. It collapses the distance between the sacred and the gritty in a way I didn't know I needed.
And then there's the way he treats his collaborators. His features with artists like Danny Brown are masterclasses in extraction. Peggy has the power to pull the weirdest, most unique aspects of anybody he works with and cook it into the most profound and FUN AS FUCK stuff to hear. He doesn't water people down to fit his sound. He makes the sound stretch wider to hold them.
Every time I hear a JPEGMAFIA song or album, it drives me into my practice mode — the one where I try to sound coherent rather than just angry as fuck for no reason. He's the proof that you can be loud, weird, and abrasive without being incoherent. That's the bar.
Rap takes a long time to get into. Like 10,000 hours just to begin — and who knows how many thousands more before you actually sound good. It's a humbling number. But it's also a freeing one, because it means there's no shortcut and no failure that can't be reframed as practice.
Well worth the journey. I would've spent those hours playing video games or some other stupid shit if I hadn't found my love toward writing essays and yapping in text form for my future readers to enjoy (I'd hope, lol).
The LIFEWATER lens
in my own work.
Tracks like OVZR.INSM (Overzealous Daimons & Devices) are still WIP — I'm only 2+ months in learning my wave of rapping as a whole. The gap between where Peggy is and where I am is enormous, and I know that. But the gap isn't the point. The point is that someone walked it first, refused to be polite about it, and left footprints I can study.
Listening to Peggy isn't about copying him. It's about giving myself permission to chase the weirdness — to trust the gospel samples and the rage in equal measure, to stop trying to sound like other rappers and start sounding like the version of myself that's been waiting underneath all the polite second-guessing. The path I'm walking has been walked by someone who refused to be careful first, and that knowledge alone is enough to keep me at the desk on the days the words don't come.
Drive these next
Peggy's frequent collaborator on tracks like Lean Beef Patty. The voice is unmistakable — high-pitched, manic, brilliant. Where Peggy preaches, Danny cackles.
For when you need the rage but with sharper cinema. Denzel writes like a director — every track has shot composition. Melt My Eyez See Your Future is the gateway.