In the early 90s, the Poor Righteous Teachers, Public Enemy, Ice Cube, The Coup and Paris comprised an axis of what amounted to neo-Black Panther Rap. Peggy is clearly one of the most important heirs to that tradition, but steeped in the nightmare irony and Internet pop culture scaffolding of this generation. If his most obvious peers ostensibly seem like Tyler the Creator and Death Grips, there’s a higher stakes and deeper sense of loathing. A streak of performance art that never feels performative and free of anything resembling gimmickry. If anything, he’s closest to an outsider artist like Lil B, who could take clichés and ephemeral symbols and re-appropriate them into his own mutant cosmology.

But if the Based God stressed kindness and radiant positivity, JPEG is searching for an affirmation through the negative. He is lancing the boils on the body politic with a machete not a scalpel. To watch him perform at Coachella was to sense a trigger being cocked back for three decades and letting the ammunition spray. His voice sounds like a nail bomb and the crowd chants “Fuck You Peggy.” He leaps into the crowd like a wrester off the top rope and is swarmed by a sea of bucket hats and neon. Back on-stage, he bangs his head against the speaker, writhes like Darby Crash, shakes his head, sinewy muscles sweating in the infernal desert sun.

Once upon a time, there were was the original Lollapalooza, which pioneered the modern American music festival—a place whose entire mission seemed to be to put on for the outsiders, subversives, and freaks, the dwindling sense of counter-culture being swept up in Clintonian neo-liberalism, the last gasp before listening to music become synonymous with a tech company owned by a dreary Scandinavian oligarch. Its legacy was bequeathed to Coachella, a festival whose first decade was largely dedicated to this same idea of underground music as a form of a resistance to encroaching techno-capitalism. At the same time, it was a difficult place to keep your sneakers clean.

For slightly over 30 minutes on Saturday afternoon, JPEGMAFIA existed as more than just a nostalgic throwback to what this festival once was. He seemed to offer a ray of a shadowy light that someone whose sensibility is scarred, whose humor is caustic, and whose catalogue includes light death threats against a legendary British band who have reportedly been offered millions to reunite at this same festival. He even got the bros in backwards Maui snapbacks to headbang, and even if it’s unclear if most of the audience didn’t exactly get what they were fighting against, they were willing to follow Peggy wherever he wanted to take them. I suppose that’s a start.

Drenched in sweat, practically on the verge of collapse from the heat and exertion and energy vortex temporarily created in this branded patch of desert, Peggy crouched in a corner of the stage and smiled, telling the audience “this is my first time of Coachella and it’s really tight and I’m very high.” It was understood by all. Then he told them that he loved them and stomped off-stage, back into the abyss.