Concert Review: JPEGMAFIA ENTERS THE MATRIX
This world is chaos. Now, I cannot say it was ever a rainbow but JPEGMAFIA’s show made people feel like they could acknowledge the Godzilla of the room. It was an effect that I had felt with Flatbush Zombies; a capacity to take the fear of this viral world we live in and transform it into a sonic, horror movie that made you feel like the Monstars about to smash the Looney Tunes at Brooklyn Steel #SpaceJamReference
It is a strange effect because, in some ways, its like making Godzilla the hero and Tokyo the villain. Imagine That! Imagine if Godzilla was simply trying to get home, maybe, the civilians took his family, or he was, actually, trying to hold a civil conversation and everyone thought him evil. Sadly, that is the experience of a lot of people in this world, especially the social media one. While, often, social media can be the loud rumbling between influencers, supremacists, and wannabe revolutionaries, there is a giant group that goes hidden: the regular person. JPEGMAFIA makes music for the person that scrolls through feeds watching the world seemingly tweet itself to death. Okay, I may be coming off way darker, but, the truth is, JPEGMAFIA uses sound to make his crowd visually free and it made him more than a star…. he was a symbol.
From light beams to sounds that roared and grizzled like teeth shattering skittles, there was something incredibly fun, colorful, and oddly “Stranger Things” to JPEGMAFIA. I know I keep on comparing JPEGMAFIA’s vibe to Flatbush Zombies, in part, because they were equally packed, but they also shared this dynamic of “counter-culture” that felt cinematic and fun. Frankly, we have all dreamt about “going rogue” and escaping the worlds we know to make another one, and as the crowd moshed and mashed in body and mind, you would think we were breaking a Matrix Simulation, and JPEG was our Morphius. He was fun, free, rambunctious, and passing the red pill to open our minds like nothing.
