JPEGMAFIA’s All My Heroes Are Cornballs rides on the success of his 2018 effort Veteran. The same motifs, tools and ad-libs set the scene again as MAFIA traces back his anguish, trauma and anxiety in his characteristically murky, comical lo-fi rap. His signature “you think you know me” line tags nearly every track, circling back to an ever-persistent theme of there being more pain and truth beneath one’s surface persona. Much like his former releases, All My Heroes conveys his trauma as a veteran, with imagery of bullets and mental turmoil scattered across the tracks. But don’t let this fool you into thinking this album is a Veteran 2.0. “It was funny to me,” MAFIA said of Veteran’s success in an interview with Billboard. “It was interesting seeing people react to something I made in a private time, having them attach weird, preconceived notions onto it that that aren’t real.” Veteran presented itself at a point in MAFIA’s career in which he took a turn towards more personal work. Operating in the experimental underground rap scene for years, MAFIA never expected Veteran to explode onto the mainstream rap charts. “There was nothing indicating it would be anything else. I’m glad it did receive the reaction it did, though. That was a blessing.” MAFIA is haunted by the same troubles he was 18 months ago, from being a former veteran to his mental state and aspirations for his career. This time around, however, a lot of it is muffled under his newfound popularity since Veteran. This is projected into a lot of All My Heroes songs, a dense 18-track project cut from the 93 that MAFIA created since Veteran — with these, it’s clear that fame doesn’t afford the same ease as being an underground Baltimore rapper. “Beta Male Strategies” follows this narrative directly. Not apparent from the get-go, this song serves as a clap-back to Twitter trolls who trash MAFIA’s work and character without having a true scope of either one. He directly shifts from telling off his haters to “say what you said on Twitter right now” to proclaiming “Young PEGGY, I’m a false prophet / Bringing white folks this new religion” in reference to his embrace from publications like Pitchfork. A tried-and-true theme in the rap scene, but unlike any other artist, MAFIA manages to create a comedic bend, audibly chewing food as he recites “Ain’t no details / Ain’t no conversation” onto a beautiful, hazy synth-wave intro. Sentiments on MAFIA’s potential to disappoint haters are mimicked from Twitter throughout the entire album. “Post Verified Lifestyle” most directly taps into this energy, computer-mouse clicks ringing in the bare, bouncy lo-fi intro. MAFIA, however, follows in with hard hitting vocals, his imagery oscillating on a blurred continuum of gunshots and internet activity. “I’m treatin’ this bitch like a cuck, brrt, MAC, loadin’ it up,” he spits in the first verse. Sonically speaking, All My Heroes shudders through hard-hitting samples and keyboards to sheer twinkling, plucking synths and flutes. Never a sparse or stable moment, the album toys with our expectations as it deftly cuts back between the rougher MAFIA we met on Veteran to a softer, subdued version introduced to us on All My Heroes Are Cornballs. It’s most impressive when it morphs our perception of sound, the imperceptible pitching, coughs and sighs, gun ad-libs and looped samples subtly coloring the entire experience. This, strangely enough, ties the entire album together, shading the chaotic beat shifts and sporadic vocal outbursts well under the amplified glitchy beats and scratchy instrumentals. This blurry concept unfolds and pairs well thematically. Though certainly far from a concept album, it forms itself on top of references that blend well into one another and amplify the messages carried by the sound. “PTSD” aptly conveys this. It’s MAFIA at his most exasperated, as he raps about his mental state. Its intro beat mimics the sound of multiple gunshots firing at once after an echoing narrator recites “Don’t stop” over and over again under sheer keyboards. Snapshots that paint individual songs like this carry on throughout others to generate a more cohesive feel. Notably, “Grimy Waifu”, a track that seemingly harkens back to your favorite anime intro from 2014, proves itself to be less about a potential love interest and more about his relationship to a weapon of some sort, the metaphor constantly evolving between his ideas about his job to those about war and racism. We find a similar effect even in brief references to guns in other songs’ verses, whether a gunshot sounding ad-lib or a reference to him stuffing a glock in his pocket. At the thematic core of the album is the track “Kenan vs. Kel.” A direct reference to the iconic ’90s sitcom “Kenan & Kel,” the song unfolds as a combat between two sides that should be working together. It features the most effortless beat shift of the entire album and ties in nearly all of its themes and ideas. It harkens back to the female perspective introduced to us on lead single “Jesus Forgive me, I Am A Thot.” Through constant references to being a “thot,” MAFIA communicates his unwillingness to conform to society’s standards for his music and persona. With some of the album’s most creative bars, it manages to tie in images of him as “Prince Peach” in the Mario franchise while conveying messages on nonconformity and unwillingness to appeal to white people. At its most deft and creative, All My Heroes Are Cornballs succeeds in its capacity to tie in themes, motifs and imagery into a central motif. In a way that Veteran couldn’t, it guides and scolds the persona of JPEGMAFIA known to the public by bouncing off of Twitter references and his more elaborate fashion choices that lead to the Heroes era. This brings us closer to a MAFIA who transfers every emotion and idea abstractly into his music in a way that casual listeners and, more importantly, haters will never understand. By striving for a true, unique and personal take, JPEGMAFIA manages to convey more about himself as an artist and appeal to fans without sacrificing his originality. MAFIA gives no shits on ‘All My Heroes are Cornballs’ ALBUM REVIEW DIANA YASSIN Daily Arts Writer All My Heroes Are Cornballs JPEGMAFIA EQT Records This summer, I saw “Network” for the first time. Then I saw it again. And again. And again. Sidney Lumet’s incendiary 1972 newsroom satire has become inescapable, lingering in my thoughts just long enough to necessitate a rewatch. Every time I return to it, I feel like I’m strapped into a roller coaster that only plummets downward. That feeling of intense, unnerving, endless vertigo is an inevitable part of watching “Network,” a movie that stretches and twists its depraved fantasy until it resembles reality. For as verbose and esoteric as it is (we’re talking about the movie that Aaron Sorkin cites as an inspiration for becoming a screenwriter), there’s hardly a dull moment in Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar- winning script. I find myself going back to “Network” so ravenously that it plays out like several types of movies packed into one. The first act is innocent and reserved compared to the rest of the movie, a dark examination of broadcaster Howard Beale (Peter Finch, “Sunday Bloody Sunday”) and his frank consideration of suicide during his last live broadcast before retirement. When he announces this intention on the air and reinvigorates ratings for the financially floundering news division, “Network” becomes an entirely different kind of movie. It loses all notions of morality or order, if it ever had them to begin with. It becomes a story uniquely of the ’70s, a nightmare of gasoline prices, generational schism, stagflation and obscene corporate politics. What I find remarkable about the rest of the movie is how easily it pulls me into its orbit. I buy into the absurdity time and time again not because I want to — I simply can’t help myself. If “Network” is all one big joke, then I want in on the punchline. The transformation of “Network” into a hypothetical hellscape happens so fast you might miss it. Experiencing this for the first time is akin to falling off a cliff. The movie is confidently going somewhere unpredictable and you are powerless to stop it. Howard himself is an indicator of this shift, turning from a past-his-prime broadcaster pushed out by the network to the company’s hottest product, a “latter-day prophet denouncing the hypocrisies of our time,” as he is ultimately known. “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” he complains. And America complains with him, literally opening their windows and yelling this token remark into the thunderous night. But the far more compelling character to arise from the film’s turn to violent sensationalism is head of programming Diana Christensen, played by Faye Dunaway (“Bonnie and Clyde”) in one of my favorite performances ever. Amid an office of crusty aging male executives, Christensen is far and away the most vibrant element of the movie. Experiencing her taking advantage of Howard’s explosion of viewership is purely satisfying. She is beautifully neurotic and unforgiving, planning three, four steps ahead for every possible outcome of her ambition. She moves her coworkers, even the higher- ups of the network, around like chess pawns both physically in the newsroom and structurally in the corporation, all of these razor-sharp calculations constantly apparent in Dunaway’s disposition. If the first and second acts have sent us off the rails and into the abyss, the third act is where “Network” jettisons its audience into the roiling lake of fire at the bottom of the pit. It’s hard to comprehend exactly how grim the narrative turns; this is where multiple viewings have allowed me to internalize the sheer scope of the carnage. When we learn what the title “Network” is actually referring to — a web of corporate cosmology, dollars that control the world, the death of the individual — the movie becomes a little too prescient for comfort. Of course, we learn all of this through Ned Beatty’s (“Toy Story 3”) legendary and terrifying monologue for which he won a Best Supporting Oscar. It’s impossible to witness this scene and ignore its logic. “There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today,” Jensen preaches. A possible reading of this line and “Network” as a whole is as a compact time capsule, starting with its feet firmly planted in the ’70s and ending in a bleaker, more modern era. As damning as the finale of “Network” is, both to the monstrous corporations of the world and the wicked populism that fuels cable news, it’s all one big joke. It’s little more than a playlist of worst-case hypotheticals, cycled to the point of insanity. The movie fearmongers, it coaxes one into its carefully spun half-truths. By the end, it may be hard to know exactly what’s real. That’s why I haven’t been able to keep myself away from the movie. “Network” has an iridescence in its commentary: It’s satire and reality mixed irreversibly together. This flexibility makes the film a thrilling, enigmatic rewatch. And I know that for all the certainties I attach to its meaning, satirical or otherwise, the next time I watch it I will be just as unsure as I was the first time. The absurd corporate politics of ‘Network’ will never get old FILM NOTEBOOK The 2019 Man Booker nominees are out and, with a tense month of reading ahead, why not rest on our laurels and remember 2018’s winner, “Milkman.” It takes only a page or two of reading to realize that the cover of “Milkman” is deceptive. The binding of the 2018 winner of the Man Booker Prize depicts an innocuous, fluorescent-pink sunset — one of those once a year, stop-and-snap-a-photo sunsets that makes “Milkman” stands out among its fellow books. The sedative lightness of the cover seems to admit innocuousness. But “Milkman” is not innocuous. Nor is it gentle, or quiet, or apologetic — nothing that the cover may suggest about a subdued, romantic narrative. To say I wasn’t excited to read the Booker winner would be a lie — based on the superficiality of covers and excerpts, I have rooted for “Milkman” since its nomination on the long-list — but the way I fell in love with reading “Milkman” was not in the pleasant, blushing manner I had expected. It was a cycle of shock, recoil and return. Anna Burns’s third novel narrates the story of an 18-year-old girl (referred to as “Middle Sister,” as none of the characters in “Milkman” are prescribed actual names) over the course of two months. Her unnamed town is saturated with violence — violence from the ubiquitously demonized enemy countries “over the water,” violence from the renouncers of the state that control Middle Sister’s town and violence from the state police as they intervene in a village of scattered revolutionaries. Surprisingly, though, this war-zone setting is but an offhand normality in the book. Instead, it is Milkman, a paramilitary that begins making unwarranted advances on middle sister, that takes the place of chief antagonist in the book. At first glance, Burns lays out an invidious landscape that seems to hyperbolize the dark experience of growing up as a woman in the late 20th century. Maybe, Burns seems to suggest, the descent of society would look like this for all genders. But on second thought, the landscape Middle Sister walks — and how her hyperaware, rightfully-paranoid thoughts congeal in it — becomes painfully real. Middle Sister’s encounters with Milkman while walking, her fears of being drugged, the pernicious comments coming from third brother-in-law, all resonate uncomfortably with the realties meeting women today. This daring, critical kick at that experience of being a woman pays off. The apotheosis of the book’s dark and applicable portrayals is perhaps Tablets Girl, a “girl who was actually a woman,” that is one of the local outcasts in Middle Sister’s town due to her propensity to poison people. This usually takes place, most suitably and without retribution, in bars. People flee from Tablets Girl, people watch their drinks when Tablets Girl is around. It’s not just Burns’s clear allusion to date-rape that that is to be appreciated here, but her spiked humor and exaggeration also. This is not to reduce “Milkman” down to a forced, constricted focus on gender- politics though. Burns’s writing alone is remarkable (something I refuse to say passively). “Milkman” is brimming with endlessly long paragraphs, lose-your- train-of-thought stretched sentences and digressing thoughts from Middle Sister that render the book incredibly complex. At first, I was perturbed by this formal and royal- esque writing, especially upon an encounter with a paragraph spanning four, almost five, pages. But as I continued, I found myself — in an unlikely way — reading Middle Sister’s voice in an uninterrupted pattern even more critical and translucent than I expected possible. This is assisted by Burns’s near-perfect draw of synonyms through the book, making her writing appear dependably careful and personal. I was enamored by the characters in “Milkman” and the abrasive humor that was tacked onto them. It isn’t often that I get a full cast of characters (narrator, antagonist, family) that are so real, so exciting to encounter. Most memorable are the “wee sisters,” Middle Sister’s three younger sisters who, despite their young ages, are infatuated with topics such as French revolutionaries, going through “Kafka phases” and eavesdropping every moment they get. Characters like the wee sisters offer unexpected gratification along Burns’s dark timeline of events. The real humor displayed make “Milkman” all the more authentic and pleasurable. I love “Milkman” because it is a fruitful attempt to offer me hints of a human experience I will never be able to understand, let alone be familiar with. Perhaps the most evocative and vivid account in the vein of social-rebellion and unwanted-gaze I have ever encountered, “Milkman” is a narrative that has been told repeatedly, even frequently in the 21st century. Burns’s unequivocal writing turns this narrative into a fearsome chant, one well worth shouting along to. A timely throwback to Burns’s ‘Milkman’ HALL-OF-FAME BOOK REVIEW JOHN DECKER Book Review Editor ANISH TAMHANEY Daily Arts Writer UNITED ARTISTS AMAZON PRIME / YOUTUBE EMMA CHANG 6 — Tuesday, September 17, 2019 Arts The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com