Recently, I’ve been finding myself with two itches which have been bothering me for too long now: an itch to write and an itch to relisten to some albums I’ve heard this year and this seems like a way to scratch them both! If I do remember correctly, SCARING THE HOES marks the start of my musical journey (kinda)... I’ll explain, see, one day, I found The 4Chan Music Chart, the /mu/core one and I saw that as a great way to discover new music. I listened to one album from that chart every day but I never really formed my own opinions or even thought deeply about what I was listening to. My first listen of SCARING THE HOES marks the first time I began to take music seriously.
I never really tried to keep up with new releases in music before this year. I mostly just listened to whatever I found and I mostly happened to find 60s and 70s psychedelic rock but at the start of 2024, I began to surround myself with more and more musically inclined people and felt obliged to at the very least, try to keep up with new releases. It was only January at the time and nothing really piqued my interest so I decided to listen to some 2023 albums until something did. The first 2023 album that I decided to listen to was SCARING THE HOES by Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA.That was on 12 January 2024 (according to my super secret spreadsheet).
I’d found out about it through the single Lean Beef Patty and that just blew me away, I’d never heard anything like it at the time and before I could even register what I was listening to… it ended
However, come 12 January and I listened to the album for the first time.
LAYER 2 -GARBAGE OPINION KID
When I first heard this album, I thought it was very backloaded, which just means, I thought all the good songs were on the second half of the album. I found many of the songs on the first half to be off-putting. Steppa Pig was all compressed and awkward sounding, SCARING THE HOES was literally just sex noises being rapped over Garbage Pale Kids, Burfict! and Fentanyl Tester had terrible verses,or atleast, that’s what I thought at the time.
However on relisten, I feel completely different, for starters, I don’t feel the need to use terms like “frontloaded” or “backloaded” so I could pretend I understood music. For entree, all of the songs I found weak on first listen grew on me heavily. I think the songs that I initially hated grew to be my favorites on the album. Burfict! Was actually the song that convinced me to relisten to the album. It starts off all grand with the trumpets as if it’s announcing royalty but as the beat kicks in, it begins to sound like you’re in a casino with all the slot machines announcing a jackpot.
I also now realize that the verses on this album were great and really funny too. I even laughed at some of them on my first listen. While, yes, it employs a lot of memes and gen-z humor which may date this album but I still think some of the lyrics on here are well-written. Sometimes, it’s a subversion of classic rap tropes, other times it makes use of religious imagery, sometimes it plays into the personas of Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA but most of the time it’s all three. There’s also some commentary on the current state of hip-hop and I enjoy hearing this sort of commentary from rappers like Danny Brown or JPEGMAFIA because they’ve been making music for a long time and saw how modern hip-hop has come to the point where it is now and they embrace the modernity of it while still paying homage to the more classic elements of the genre. I get the sense that these two are very in tune with internet culture as well.
When I listen to music, I usually do this thing where I close my eyes and try to envision where the music takes me. That sounds like something a stoner would say, I know but just stick with me here. When I close my eyes and just let the music take me away, I am taken to this resort where my family would go during the holidays. It’s a lovely place, my grandparents would go to the casino often and let me go the arcade and when I ran out of tokens, there was a little restaurant between the casino and arcade where I’d sit and wait for them. It was a horrible place for a restaurant, it had this fancy ambience which was constantly disrupted by the casino and the arcade on either side. Smooth jazz would clash with children screaming and the beeps of arcade machines and the jackpot noises from the casino, when I hear SCARING THE HOES, that’s what I think of, in a good way!
As a kid, hearing all that noise, it was overwhelming but as I look back, it’s comforting to me. This album is much the same. I listened to this during the day but as I am writing this now, it’s night time and it’s a different vibe. I find it odd to say this but… this album is comforting. It makes me feel warm inside. That feels weird to say about an album titled SCARING THE HOES but it’s how I feel and I can’t exactly change that.
LAYER 4 - THE BOTTOM LINE!
This is kind of a stolen term but I like it. THE BOTTOM LINE! It sounds important, no? This is kind of like the conclusion where I provide my final verdict.
I give this album a 10/10!
It is the Jimmy Timmy Power Hour of music. The perfect culmination of everything really, Danny and Peggy, Old school and modern, it’s just the right amount of odd. It’s perfect, it’s all balanced nicely and the result is something that I adore and will continue to adore as time goes on.
Now, how did I do? This was my first ever album review in this format. I could be talking out of my ass and it’s fair if you think so, I still have a lot to learn about music, writing, google docs even and hopefully you’ll tag along for that! I’m not sure what I have in store for my next review but we’ll see! Thank you for reading!
