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Jonwayne drops mixtape featuring Flying Lotus and Samiyam beats

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“What’s a man supposed to say in the age of post-discovery?” Jonwayne, he of the bazooka baritone, blares on “Bus Stops,” one of the highlights of his new mixtape, “I Don’t Care.”

“Wise men are only shutting up, so let’s get ignorant,” he concludes. It’s his version of “he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.” Indeed, “I Don’t Care” is a barbaric roar from the 21-year-old producer and rapper.

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Part intricate internal rhyme brag raps and part introspective bloodletting, it heralds the La Habra native’s official arrival as a rapper, after ripping mikes at the Low End Theory and dropping guest spots sporadically. Earlier this year, Wayne conjured up “Bowser” for Alpha Pup, a record that Daddy Kev, the label’s honcho, hailed as his favorite release of the year.

That record consolidated the eight-bit beats of Wayne’s older stylings -- the new material is evidence of his rapid evolution. Along the way, he’s assembled a steadily growing fan base that has been waiting on the long-promised full length rap record, one rumored to be dropping soon on Stones Throw.

See such tracks as “Outsider’s Asylum,” where he bludgeons a Dibiase beat that sounds as if it were made to score a horror flick on Tattooine. He sounds almost as snarling as the M.O.P. samples that set it off. A descendent of the Revolutionary War Gen. ‘Mad Anthony’ Wayne, Jonwayne channels his ancestry, claiming that “me and D are evil/like Stephen King’s people/trying to reach the peak of the steeple/without reaching for the needle.”

On “Experiment 17,” he and Blqbrd demolish a smoke-riddled jazz beat like a lost Lootpack record. It’s rap music for those raised on Madvillain, Edan’s “Beauty and the Beat” and with a little of the gleeful barbarianism of R.A. the Rugged Man.

Assembling beats from Low End Theory heavy hitters (Flying Lotus, Samiyam and Wayne himself), the rapper-producer incinerates everything from down-tempo jazz-inflected trip-hop to the Space Age suffocation of street bass.

On “Story One,” he paints a portrait of the artist as loner, loving video games and despising school, getting beaten by bullies five years older and refusing to snitch for fear of even more savage retribution. “Story Two” finds him painting a hallucinatory story of falling through floors and grabbing mikes. It’s rap at its most disorienting and damaging. Raw and visceral music that demonstrates exactly how much he cares.

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ZIP: Jonwayne -- ‘I Don’t Care’

-- Jeff Weiss

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