Underground hip-hop fans recently flocked to Twitter upon the release of JPEGMAFIA’s highly-anticipated album, I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU, which dropped this past Thursday. The focus of their tweets, apart from a wave of praise towards the unbelievably consistent producer-rapper, was directed at a couple of bars thrown at Drake.
On a couple of songs, JPEG (or Peggy) springboards off of Kendrick Lamar’s recent allegations that brought to light some of Drake’s inappropriate behaviour around teenage girls. Four tracks down, on ‘it’s dark and hell is hot,’ he raps: “Private school rappers don’t know what it is / If I show you a Drac’, I ain’t playin’ with kids.”
This play on words in particular appears to reference a prominent lyric from Kendrick’s ‘euphoria’: “The very first time I shot me a Drac’, the homie had told me to aim it this way / I didn’t point down enough, today I’ll show you I learned from those mistakes.”
Peggy doesn’t let go on the very next track, ‘New Black History,’ featuring Vince Staples. He raps, “When I come around better stare at the floor / ‘Cause I’m in that mode, on my own I got that flavor (Jonathan Major) / ‘Specially when y’all cashing out for PDFs and rapers (No Drizzy).”
Backlash On Twitter
Some rap listeners on Twitter felt that JPEG jumped on the bandwagon of Drake-hate only to garner attention and clicks for himself. The popularity of Kendrick’s climactic diss against the Canadian rapper, after all, is still not slowing down.
However, as Peggy almost immediately clarified on Twitter/X, Kendrick was not the first rapper to call out Drake, and he himself has dissed Drake on previous albums.
“1st off i been dissing that n***a since 2016, them shits was throwaway bars not noteworthy,” he wrote. “second off if anybody got a problem with what i said on this album, my tour dates in bio. third, yall cant even pay your rent but defending drake for free, go outside and be somebody.”
If you’re bothered enough to search, you’ll find that his claims are true. On the 2016 track, ‘drake era,’ he divulges a sense of bitterness around contemporary hip hop. He raps, “I’m just trying to take hip-hop out the Drake era.” On ‘1539 N. Calvert,’ which dropped in 2018, he jokes, “I need all my bitches same colour as Drake.”
But some Twitter users expressed different criticisms of JPEG’s supposedly “throwaway bars,” focusing on the one-sidedness of the beef and the seeming obsession the emcee has with an artist who is far more popular. As one user iterated, “You don’t even have enough fans to do this with Drake.”
Why Aubrey Of All People?
But relevance has never been a requirement for someone to criticise others, especially when their target is Drake, who has been unmatched (numbers-wise) in the hip-hop scene for longer than a decade. Joe Budden, DMX and Yasiin Bey (f.k.a. Mos Def) instantly come to mind: each voiced their own thoughts about what having Drake at the forefront would mean for the genre as a whole.
Arguably, the criticisms conveyed by these rappers are quite similar to some of the JPEG lyrics above. “I’m just trying to take hip-hop out the Drake era” resembles Bey’s concern that Drake’s music is more style than substance, compatible with shopping. Although JPEG is certainly more mean-spirited and blunt in his criticisms, I believe that the two emcees are coming from similar angles.
Peggy is certainly on the diametrically opposing side of the hip-hop spectrum. His music is loud, weird and abrasive; he has an album called SCARING THE HOES. Drake has an album called Certified Lover Boy, which should tell you on its own how different they are artistically. Yet they both represent hip-hop, which only shows how far the genre has broadened and how many seeds it has planted.
However, Drake’s brand of hip hop seems to not align with other rappers’ conception of the genre. Whether that is fair or not is for you to decide, but JPEG is free to say what he wants about Drake.
Anyone can be criticised and anyone can be dissed, as long as those criticisms are fair. And if they can be hilarious as well – as one should expect from any new JPEGMAFIA record – then that’s just a plus.
In other news: Peggy is beefing with rapper Freddie Gibbs, Gibbs does not care.
