This isn't about the Vultures stuff. I haven't listened to it yet. Based on the clips I've heard, it's probably Ye's best record since the self titled LP. Over the course of this rollout, Peggy has definitely been posting cringe, but the cringe he's been posting is emblematic of issues with his work that were obvious as far back as Cornballs.
I'm going to be boring and order this chronologically, so that you can kinda get where I'm coming from.
Back in 2016, Peggy promised the web art circuit that he was going to say something very soon. He dropped Black Ben Carson that year, a tape that immediately laid all his cards on the table. He's namedropping B L A C K I E on this thing. He's doing half hearted Bernie Sanders disses and sampling that one cop killing video that always got posted on /x/. This is a catastrophically online man making shock jockey music, and it works! It's got a great balance of solid rapping and atmospheric tracks that show off his talents as a producer. That same year, he dropped The 2nd Amendment, the best tape he'd ever release. He produced most of the tape himself and passed rapping duties back and forth between him and Freaky. Their interplay is fantastic and both of them have moments where they shine on their own.
Between these two tapes, Peggy successfuly cultivated an image as an intrusive species. He was tapped into the scene and he was angry about it. It's worth repeating that Peggy's making out there, forward thinking, scary, loud rap music since 2011. He was riding the MySpace runoff wave that produced some of the most interesting music of that decade. When I think of similar artists, your Lil Ugly Manes or what have you, those people may have made aggressive sounding music, even music that was politically charged, but few of them incorporated the basement dwelling reality of their very nerdy scenes into their art in a way that felt tasteful. Travis Miller was impersonating a scary rapper, that was the whole point of the project. What made Peggy unique in this space was that it felt like he was punching the walls of his enclosure. He was the only guy in this neck of the woods that signified unrest with his placement. He was hungry and angry and talented, and it was really exciting. I came away from this era of Peggy's music, more than anything else, interested in what he'd do next.
In early 2018, he dropped Veteran, and it was cool! He made the wise choice of turning the camera on himself a bit more here, working his millitary background and personal struggles into the bars and packaging. He reaffirms that he was riding that wave back when it first picked up. It makes sense, then, for him to stand his ground here. He crystalizes the chaotic sound he was developing into a suite of stadiumsized bangers. Baby I'm Bleeding is the perfect end credits music for this era of weirdo Bandcamp music.
After that track, though, the album slows down a lot. The beats become shorter and sketchier, the raps harder to hold onto. The back half of Veteran is a comedown. He's settling back into his pocket after launching to the heights of the first half. It's endeering here, confident even, and results in a record that has a meaningful arc throughout it's runtime. The message is obvious: he's clearing out the resovoir. Peggy has broken through, and the next album is going to be the start of something new.
This album would theoretically be All My Heroes Are Cornballs, one of the worst album titles of all time. The rollout of Cornballs included a vlog series of Peggy playing the record for industry figureheads, with each video's title formatted as "X is Disappointed." These videos have a three-pronged purpose; we are brought closer to Peggy by learning more about his influences, we get a clearer idea of who he now has access to in the industry, and we're assured again, this time in writing, that the new album is really going to be something different. Cornballs doesn't have any rap features, either. This is very much going to be a mission statement album.
And then, it wasn't. He mentions in one of the Disappointed videos that he didn't really trim any of the tracks on this record, and damn, you can sure tell. The whole thing sounded like autopilot Peggy with a higher budget, a lot of well ornamented concepts that rarely resolve into satisfying album material. Lots of production, not much writing. Any moment that bangs feels anxious to finish up as soon as it starts. How the fuck are you going to open the record with a beat as high energy as the one on Jesus Forgive Me I Am a Thot only to struggle to wring to verses out of it? Why is he so scared of rapping on this record? I've heard him rap! We can barely get a 16 bar outta him here.
Well, he has clearly exhausted his pool of pop culture references and is sputtering to pin down what to write about. This man was pushing thirty releasing songs called Grimy Waifu. He was fighting for his fucking life. He teased the idea of writing something about his (rather interesting!) background on Veteran, but I guess he decided not to do that. I think, more than anything else, you can reeeeally tell he moved to LA. I don't intend to imply that his music used to be good only because he was poor and complicit, but I do think, more than any other artist in recent memory, his rise to the upper middle class of music made him complicit and boring. This album is a business card, something Peggy can slide to executives so they can put it on shuffle and "get the idea." These tracks sound like parodies of JPEGMafia songs because they kinda are. I still can't believe he literally just put his DOTS freestyle on here. That's so fuckin embarassing.
The EP!s and LP! are more of the same. I'm hard pressed to name a single song off any of those projects. The wave has officially crashed. Daveed Diggs is in Hamilton now. Scaring the Hoes fucking sucks too. It's good to know that Peggy has also forgotten how duo tapes work. How do you book a full project with literally Danny Brown and have no back and forths for the entire runtime? Zero chemistry. They sound like they're recording on different continents. All of these beats were obviously just made with Peggy's range in mind (I'm sure Peggy was excited to only have to rap half as much as he usually does). Every song gets bored of itself after a minute. They're elaborite productions with very little to say, each of them were critical darlings. I wouldn't mind this so much if Peggy didn't keep insisting that he's doing something exciting.
The main lyrical throughline of all of Peggy's music is him saying that white people are scared of him, and his audience is historically white. Neither of these facts are damning on their own. Their coexistance actually made a lot of sense back in the Bandcamp days, when Peggy was trying to carve a niche in a small scene of influential dweebs. The issue is he's up now. He's been producing for big names for the better part of a decade. If he wanted to say anything, he's had all the power in the world to do that, but he's only gotten as far as Twitter arguments as of now. Him saying crackers are scared of him is birdsong, because they're not, and he knows they're not.
There has to come a point of introspection, right? When you're branding a whole album around being scary and offputting while receiving nothing but praise from your audience, something aught to click, right?
So like, when I see people get mad at Peggy for working with Ye after repeatedly dissing him, I see myself displaced in time by a couple years. I see a large group of people who probably hopped on during the Cornballs era realizing for the first time that Peggy isn't really talking about anything. He can throw out a flacid Baby Keem diss knowing damn well that if he gets a call from him tomorrow, he'd be doing his dishes.
Listening one of the most promising artists of the previous decade pitter out into nothing has been one of my most miserable music listening experiences in recent memory. He seems like an interesting guy, but you really wouldn't know that based on his recent output. He has been given all the time and resources in the world to say anything and has instead opted to say nothing, and it is so so strange that this behavior has been broadly rewarded by the listening public.
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