Jvcki and the Banshees

in the name of Me

<Women/Figure: Mama Series> Jang Pa 2023

Black gall, the saturnine temper of melancholy, was praised by the Florentine neo-Platonists as a frame of mind capable of stimulating ingenious flights of thought and a deep self-awareness.
~ Alexander Roch, Alchemie & Mystik

[Marie de France’s] Lais were not meant to be read in silence - or in prose. In the original they are in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, and they were to be performed, sung and mimed, probably to a loose melody, or to a variety of them, and perhaps in places sung almost conversationally over chords and arpeggios.
~ John Fowles, Eliduc

Poor as I am, I do try to pay for the music of artists I admire, especially independent artists, and encourage you to do the same, which is why you get so many Bandcamp links here instead of more convenient Spotify playlists. But there’s a wider library of sounds in production, and every so often I’ll look up artists I follow on Soulseek for any rarities and unofficial remixes that its users have squirrelled away.
A few weeks ago I downloaded this CRYLOMORPH edit of Zheani’s ‘Skinwalker’ from I Hate People On The Internet (2022), easily the greatest album of modern times.

And once again I wondered, whence did this voice come, where are its peers, this rebel voice that truly groks the potential of autotune, a technology used by thousands, but understood by only a tiny handful, most of whom won’t take the risks that make Zheani’s pointed notes and phrases endlessly recyclable by remix and mash-up creators?

And once again I find myself indebted to

Dave Moore

, who posted new track ‘Spoil U’ by Vangdale and Jvcki Wai a couple of weeks ago. ‘Spoil U’ is a similar sort of electro-freakbeat romp to Lee Mvtthews’ ‘Circles’ from last week’s essay (surely v coincidence), but that voice, with its autotune compression, whip-like phrasing and microglitch edits, began to connect loose wires in my brain, making me look up other Jvcki Wai releases, all equally expertly autotuned and (with a few exceptions and excepting the various pop collaborations) akin to fairy trap, albeit dystopian and strange, like some future Grimes or FKA Twigs long ago reneged on.¹ So far I’ve found three official EPs and albums, Exposure (2016), Neo Eve (2017), and Enchanted Propaganda (2018), and an underground mixtape Good Bye World (2017), a more lo-fi set that includes several tracks from Exposure, including this superior original version (prod. Clam) of ‘Back To What’, a deliriously sloppy techno disco tune that demonstrates the fun side of Wai and her ability to insert humour and pathos (and ambiguity) into the simplest of ideas.

06/05/2025 - combining the Exposure and Good Bye World versions of ‘Back To What’ seems to have created a supermix.

5-song EP Neo Eve might be the best place to start, with its energized pop-rap manifesto of an intro ‘Anarchy’, before dropping sci-fi religious mysteries (is Maria in ‘No Maria But A Human’ some future robot, the mythical Virgin, or both?)

‘RIB’ delivers the dystopian feminist theology promised by the EP’s title, reimaging Genesis - if Eve were Lilith - “in the name of Me”.

I'm sorry I ate the fruit called your Bible
The line between XY and XX is still beneath the Cross
It's not vertical or parallel
It's not a function or math
I live in this hell called life
I know Satan is the other side of man
I'm real and I just want to breathe
Let it explode and watch, the real utopia I will create
They said I'm from his fuckin' rib
I don't know who he is
I sucked on mama's fuckin' tits
I can't tell you who that bitch is

Also “in the name of Me” is Neo Eve’s masterpiece, ‘To. Lordfxxker’, a diss track recounting a hellish childhood in a Christian home, God being told to “fuck yourself” in wonderful tone and phrasing, then - with a slower tempo and a swinging break in the beat - to '“get the fuck out of my life”.

Returning to Earth or the present day with the comforting sadness (and an unforgettable tune) of ‘Every Breath’.

Every breath I take
Every breath you take
Every breath we take
They’re so alone, they’re so alone

For Jvcki Wai, God died in the 21st Century, and her existential moment is Now. Her embattled vision of an anarchic new world, a world in the name of Me is laid out in chapters on concept album Enchanted Propaganda. Even as translated by the internet, I can’t better this splendid review by Irosa, which told me that I really had heard the revolutionary work I thought I’d heard, and places it in the South Korean context.

”From the perspective of a 'female rapper', Jackie Wai takes a different path than many other female rappers. That is, she does not imitate male rappers. She does not hide or neutralize her femininity, lower her voice, or try to look strong or heavy without context. Instead, what she has is a sharp 'girl's' voice. A natural voice for a young woman of her age. She raps as if she is singing in a 'whining' voice, and sometimes distorts her voice a lot with auto-tune.
Jackie Wai is probably one of the rare female anarchist characters in Korea. In an era where agitators, idealists, and punks have disappeared, Jackie Wai's kitschy, cyberpunk, pretentious, sly, linguistic vanity, and superficial album may be something some listeners have been waiting for. In reality, it may not be so, but the world of art still needs a narrative of a crazy agitator who talks about a bigger dream.”

Exactly.

Throughout Enchanted Propaganda, Wai’s lead vocal is backed by her wildly inventive non-verbal vocalizations, an accompaniment that may be derived from the “dolphin voice” of K-pop boy bands, trilling, whooping along, similar to the more personal effects found later on Zheani songs like ‘Lava’ and all over Sacramento rapper Stunna Girl’s Stunna This Stunna That album (2022). The album’s production - despite the tracks having many different producers, and despite the playful bounce of many beats - is consistently nocturnal and cold, with a frosty witchhouse finish. There’s a sense of reductive solidity about all these works, perfected by a process of experimentation and accretion. The bounce in the beats reminds me of reggae; imagine how ‘dOgMa’ would sound with a doubled, or echoed, chop on the offbeats. Perhaps this is a useful distinction in trap - beats that could easily be reggaefied vs those that couldn’t, trap that has a root in dub vs trap that doesn’t.

‘dOgMa’s lyric builds a huge heretical structure in Wai’s image:

A red sea spreads out in front of me
Every last one of you will be swept away
I will ultimately survive
I’m just that kind of person
Don’t say useless shit
I’ll just shut my mouth
My money will peel it all back and reveal your head above which I hurriedly climb the steps and steal that ambiguous place
Take off your shades and
Look at the success I’ll be
Money will pile up in my bank account
Even if the public becomes my enemy,
I won’t lower myself, not even inwardly
Try to keep up with my pace
Gold spills over this waterfall
Get rid of useless stuff
Empty the remaining glasses
Above the gleaming chopping block
Above the truthful dogma

I was reflected in the mirror
This ambition will never end
This disease seemed like it would last forever
I pushed back treatment
I’ll try all of the pleasures of the Earth then tell it to fuck off and declare war
There’s no longer any meaning to living like a beggar, is there?
You all hold untruths in your hand but there’s a bright, great path instead
I’ll pass over God’s stage and break from nature’s providence
The place I can’t touch is the very shrine I make a pilgrimage to
Just a single truth
A single path

The Korean lyrics of ‘Capitalism’ justify that big title, even mangled by an online translation app

You deceive me
You deceive me
You just read
The setting sun is like the middle of the night here
Stop it
Art is human and human is money, greed is money, commerce is money
Profit is money, love is money, nature is…what?
What?
The goddess next to me is Nike, so just do it, I swoosh
Art and honesty, what the hell are you talking about,
Woof
I'll hit you with a whip

Trapped in this magical vortex
Only one way
The meaning of life
Giving up is impossible
Sticky loyalty
My God is the only one
The light of glory
The one I praise
My capitalism

In ’Life Disorder’ - “ma shrink said I have a life disorder” - Wai repossesses psychiatry “in the name of Me”.

This place is full of gray dust
Scream till you die on the grave you've been given
Stupid to hope for a cure or a prayer
Purple soda, flying over the moon, on my chosen day
It's like a virus, my lifelong enemy
Lift me higher and cure my illness
Born cursed, no choice
What we are suffering from is life disorder
How can mental illness be just an exaggerated personality trait?²
.

Compared with Enchanted Propaganda, the earlier Good Bye World mixtape is more directly lo fi, sad rap in its ethos - in ‘Lo Fi’, a track from Exposure revisited on it, lo fi symbolizes dullness, contextual depression.

On ’Exposure (feat PNSB)’ itself Wai needs the whole city of Seoul to change, or else³

I've never had a panic attack
in a machine that 's already saturated
I've never been hit in the first place
so I 've never even started before
with everyone's eyes closed, asking me,
Bitch, when are you going to leave?
Let the aperture shut
My life still sucks
Let the light shine on me
I just want more
Exposure

Living in war every day every day
Every day every day
Every day every day
Every imperfect situation
And all I wish for is just love and peace
All I wish for is love and peace

In case you’re thinking that all this wonderful, bittersweet confectionery is purely a studio concoction, a live video of ‘Munch Drunk Purpp’, an Ian Purpp production in its original form, shows Wai performing a deconstructed version, her colleague Lionclad on the MIDI-pc pads expertly tapping in chords and samples, as well as keeping the beat, instead of rolling the original’s trap drum sequences.

Some collaborations, then a nifty reggaeton single, ‘Go Back’ in 2022 were the last heard from Jvcki Wai till the release of ‘Spoil U’. It’s probably not easy being an outspoken (and creatively pretentious) female artist anywhere, but the South Korean pop and hip hop industry went through major scandals in 2019, exposing the atmosphere of prurient and exploitative sexism its artists endured, over and above the usual torments of internet notoriety. There’s a Reddit post from 5 years ago describing how she disowned the personas - anarchist, feminist, atheist - from her major projects, perhaps in defense against online pressure to become a spokeswoman for causes that were a big deal 5 years ago, perhaps also in hope of better treatment from a conservative industry.
I’m almost glad I didn’t know Wai’s music before, because 3 years is a long time to wait.

Algorithmic assistance - I’m indebted to fellow Substacker

koganbot

who’s been on the case far longer than I and has put together this compilation of South Korean hip hop, rap, trap etc.

1. Fairy trap - playful, melodic feminine trap, esp with fantasy references, autotune and Far East vocal inflections - perfected in, and named after, a mere handful of songs released by Zheani in 2019-2020.

2. In an earlier life as a medical researcher, I expounded this exact theory of mental illness for Newsroom.

3. The modal melody of ‘Exposure’ sounds like Indian snake charmer notes - the Far East equivalent of musical Orientalism