Pitchfork: In lots of senses, you’re still a very underground artist, but Veteran has exposed you to a wider audience. Do you think much about the commercial ceiling for your work?

JPEGMAFIA: Originally my entire goal with music was for it to be my job. When I sit down to make a beat, I wanna know that I’m gonna get paid from it, and that I can pay my bills and still have money left over to be a person. But now, more than ever, the possibility of mainstream success—depending on the decisions I make—is in my grasp. So my aspirations are the same now, they’re just on a bigger scale. I wanna make my music as popular as it can be, get it to as many people, and just be an established force in hip-hop. I want to be here to stay. I want people to debate which albums are the best from me. I want to be part of the colloquial conversation in rap. To me, this is the golden era of hip-hop. You can get anything. If you’re a suburban teen, there’s music for you. You’ve got BROCKHAMPTON, you’ve got gangster shit, you’ve got Rich the Kid. Whatever you need from hip-hop, whatever you need to be filled with, you can find it—easily. I wanna carve out my niche.

A lot of your music deals with ideas and rhetoric—racism, homophobia, political hackery—that has been exacerbated, or at least spread wider, by the internet. What do you think of the way being online has warped communication, and do you see things getting worse?

The internet is just a tool. Information is the most important weapon we have. The reason the internet is a cesspool of bad shit and a place where great things happen is because of the nature of people—the internet is mostly weird and bad because that’s how people are. I see it more or less staying the same, continuing to reflect society. I can go to any YouTube video right now and find someone saying something negative about black people. I’ve been on the internet for a long time; I remember when I was 18 I would go to videos and be confused as to why people were saying the n-word, or being like, “Fucking blacks, I blame them for this shit,” about something that has nothing to do with us. I realize now that that’s how people are. That’s probably your dentist and your bus driver on there. He has to get it out somehow.