If there's one thing that unites "King Tim III" with the latest thing to show up on DatPiff, and covers nearly every major rap movement in between, it's the idea that the person holding the mic demands to be heard. The MC could be the runner-up in a liar's contest or the realest thing alive, a complex abstractionist or a to-the-point all-hooks shouter, a callow youngster or a restless veteran. And no matter what, that mic is in that hand because someone needs to present an identity to the world. What they almost never do, by necessity over just about everything else, is deliberately obscure that voice. Burying it in the mix, dialing it down to a background murmur, running it through contradictory, vague themes that seem ambiguous in intent and delivery: these are things that threaten to cut an MC off from a real human connection with an audience, especially a newly arriving one that's taking a chance on a relative newcomer based on hearsay and association.
Jeremiah Jae's Brainfeeder debut, Raw Money Raps, breaks that cardinal rule repeatedly. And that this leads to a fascinating enigma of a record rather than an alienating slog is some kind of minor miracle. Jae comes with an enthusiastic co-sign from Flying Lotus, and the L.A.-via-Chicago producer/MC has the sort of classic demos-to-indie-breakthrough career path laid out that should continue to do him good when it comes to cultivating his more self-directed experimental tendencies. But Raw Money Raps isn't one of those easy-access phenom artifacts that explodes out of nowhere and spawns a sea of instant-cult hashtags. It's the kind of record that seems engineered to throw people off, keep them wondering, and make them try and connect some dots of stylistic influence that lead into places that don't entirely seem attached to anything else.
Jae seems to fit in the context of a producer-as-MC rather than vice-versa. His tendency to focus more on beat tapes than lyrical exploits early in his career has led to a style that uses his production as a filter that he channels day-to-day concepts through until they become something more personal. With the exception of "Cat Fight"-- a Flying Lotus beat that rides on chipmunk vocals, head-swimming strings, and distorted Pam Grier clips that resembles a Madlib track so closely it almost feels like an inside joke-- Raw Money Raps is a fine demonstration of how far Jae's willing to push experimentation in hip-hop production while still leaving something recognizable in his wake.
"Seasons", "Tourist", and "Greetings" have the familiar base of Left Coast blunted sample-driven abstraction, but it makes the loops' seams even more fractured, turning straightforward beats into slightly-off rhythms that expand the traditional boundaries of hip-hop meter with their elasticity. The stuff that hews more closely to modern digital-meets-analog production does so subversively. Like how "Guns Go Off" takes the staggered build-up that usually gets saved for a track's intro and makes it the entire backbone. And while we're thankfully past the point where classic-rock allusions are necessary to sell a hip-hop record's psychedelic bonafides, the pre-Dark Side Pink Floyd-style keyboard-and-piano haze of "Ignorant Mask" and the VU-adjacent distorted twang in "One Herb" reveal another fitting branch in his production lineage.
Jae's character as an MC can be just as slippery. This is an artist who frontloads his album with universal-enough statements, like the make-ends-or-else observations of "Guns Go Off", the spiritual-minded, salaam-delivering "Greetings", and the youth-struggle pull of "Leaders". But he gets gradually more idiosyncratic, until by the end he's delivering rambling half-heard conversations about King Kong tactics ("Guerilla (Evolution Pt. 1)") and proposing myth-killing for the sake of community solidarity ("Hercules Versus the Commune"). Things start going deep into the outer reaches at about the halfway mark, where "Money and Food" leads into "Wires". The former track is one of those self-conscious club-rap pastiches that might sound like it's goofing on the tropes of the style if it didn't sound so much like Jae's actually wanting to sincerely try it on. The latter is a reverbed-to-oblivion swoon of off-beat delivery that sounds like it's being reeled off inside a waterlogged nuclear reactor; you can make out maybe half his lines, if that. If you're a fiend for quotables, you might get frustrated. There's this quality to his voice that makes it impossible to separate it from the music it's embedded in, or the words from the beats. And it sometimes means recalibrating your ears so the non-verbal aspects of the music take precedence and you open yourself up to let the actual lyrics sneak up on you. It's hip-hop as dream logic.
Jae is just as interested in treating his voice as an instrument to be manipulated as he is in actually putting literal messages across, and if that makes what could be his more allusive moments frustratingly vague, it clicks well as sheer music. His voice itself is a bit low-energy, but in a way that actually has some personality to it. And in doubling itself up with pitch-shifted shadows, running it through grainy home-tape murk or swaddling it in shuddering bass, that voice gets an edge to it that hints at deeper things beneath even the most well-worn clichés. Raw Money Raps is immaculately constructed as identity crises go, and there's an uncontrived honesty that feels more like someone working through a multifaceted outlook on life than testing his options for which crowd to play to. Even if you have to strain to catch that voice, its presence still has weight and meaning, whether it's unfiltered consciousness or some elusive subliminal subtext. A lot of people talk loud and say nothing; Jeremiah Jae finds strength in the inverse.
