“The Most Fucked Up Shit I Ever Wrote”
Experimental hip-hop artist JPEGMafia (Barrington DeVaughn Hendricks) stunned wide audiences in 2016 when he released “I Just Killed a Cop, Now I’m Horny,” on SoundCloud. The track has maintained relevance and still sparks discourse today– for its provocative title, its narrative focus on the desire to murder a police officer, and most of all for sampling the original audio from dashcam video of the murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle Dinkheller. JPEGMafia, also known as Peggy, is a Black musical artist, whose song opens with the narrater pulled over in a routine traffic stop. This scene evokes a story known all too well in the United States, conjuring images of Sandra Bland, Tyre Nichols, Daunte Wright, and others. The inverted narrative of the song, in which the cop becomes the victim, is shocking, and this provocation points to the fact that similar images of Black death are widely expected. By reproducing the video of Deputy Dinkheller’s death in this context, “I Just Killed a Cop, Now I’m Horny” demands engagement with questions about cultural reproduction of police violence against Black people.
Dinkheller Sample
“I Just Killed a Cop, Now I’m Horny,” is notorious primarily because it samples extensively from dashcam footage of the 1998 murder of Sheriff’s Deputy Kyle Dinkheller, a highway patrol officer. The original three-minute dashcam video starts with a traffic stop, visible through the windshield of Deputy Dinkheller’s vehicle. The man pulled over, Andrew Brannan, appears agitated as Deputy Dinkheller demands: “take your hands out of your pockets” and “get back.” Brannan calls out “shoot me” and other taunts, then reaches into his truck. Deputy Dinkheller fires a first shot. Brannan responds violently, returning fire with multiple rounds, and ultimately killing Deputy Dinkheller with a shot to the face.
The dashcam footage of the incident has taken on a second life in multiple now-ubiquitous police academy training videos. When Ron Barber, president of leading police training company In The Line of Duty, shows officers the “Dinkheller Video,” he tells them, “always remember your life is worth more than a lawsuit.” Contextualized in an argument about use of lethal force, it implicitly argues a cop’s life is worth more than the person they might murder. Barber boasts that experienced officers he has already trained view the video and within seconds shout, “shoot the son of a bitch!” Police trainings such as this one have been criticized for encouraging use of lethal force, and for failing to caution that a “shoot first and ask questions later” policy may disproportionately affect Black people and other people from historically marginalized groups, including veterans– a group to which both Andrew Brannan and JPEGMafia belong. The “Dinkheller Video” can be understood as a part of a machine that continues to produce killings– and often the video of those killings familiar in popular culture.
The relatively niche distribution of the “Dinkheller Video” stands in contrast to the mass circulation of videos of police brutality. Across the mainstream mediascape, from cable news to Twitter, images of Black death and violence against Black people are reproduced at alarming rates. The footage of the murder of George Floyd aired with such frequency that it became a visual expression of the national conversation about police brutality.
One way to understand the proliferation of Floyd’s image, as typical of the reproduction of aesthetics of violence against Black people, is through the concept of aura. In his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” the German philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin introduces aura as the authenticity of genuine experience rather than a compromised reproduction, and suggests that aura is disrupted by mass reproduction. He argues that it shifts real art, and aesthetic, into spectacle, which fundamentally alters the aesthetic impact. Viewing footage of a murder has the potential to evoke sympathy, and even mobilize and radicalize a community. Reproducibility and repetition of that footage intentionally manufactures spectacle. Producing a spectacle, defined by the way it caters to consumption, in this case of Black death, manufactures an appetite for more. Benjamin identifies this use of spectacle as a critical element in fascist society: “The logical outcome of fascism is an aestheticizing of political life.”
The reproduction of these images, as aesthetics of what racism looks like in the United States, ultimately become constitutive of the role of Black people in society. In other words, rather than raising awareness about state violence, the ubiquitous image instead communicates the state’s fascistic subjugation of Black people, and asserts comfort with this among the masses.
JPEGMafia’s “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny,” tells the familiar story of a death between an officer and a Black man, but inverts the roles such that the victim is a white officer of the state, which disturbed many listeners, even loyal fans. Deputy Dinkheller begs for his life in the audio, and it’s disturbing to listen to. Critics accused the piece of being gory, “sick”, and “disrespectful.”
Witnessing cop death isn’t familiar within the collective conscious, and thus this feels very disturbing to the listener. Comments on the SoundCloud track range from playing into the joke (“I just came”), to support of the artist but expressed discomfort at the sample of the audio, to complete vitriol and outrage at the “disrespectful” inclusion of a man begging for his life. Despite multiple attempts by reporters and journalists to evoke an explanation from JPEGMafia about the choice, he refused to comment, which made many of his critics even angrier. His refusal to engage invalidates discomfort with his choices and very directly elicits questions about why one might feel such extreme discomfort at the reproduction of an audio depicting this officer’s death, whereas videos of Black men being murdered by the police circulate social media and news outlets without question. JPEGMafia eventually did respond to calls to remove the clip from his song out of respect for the deceased, pledging to remove the clip when officers of the NYPD stop manufacturing and selling merchandise that says “I can breathe,” a mocking popularization (i.e. spectacle) made of Eric Garner’s last words. As his only further public interaction with his art, JPEGMafia reminds his audience that his appropriation of the murder of Deputy Dinkheller was inspired by the repeated replication of murders of Black people that have become ever present and inescapable in our mediascape.
JPEGMafia’s Narrative
Following the highly controversial clip of Deputy Dinkheller’s death, JPEGMafia finally enters the song at one minute and twenty-two seconds in. Rapping, he inhabits a character who narrates his own murder of a police officer. When he’s pulled over for driving around with expired plates– a common pretext for racially motivated harassment– JPEGMafia sings, “I’ve been waiting / for the right moment / to talk to talk to talk to you.” The speaker of these lines is ambiguous. They may constitute a quote of what the officer says to the narrator– an expected opening. Or perhaps they’re spoken by the narrator himself, suggesting the minor infraction of the expired plates was a ploy to lure and kill a cop– a more shocking possibility. The ambiguity of the speaker forces a comparison between the expected behavior of law enforcement and the disruptive image of a calculating Black civilian killer, questioning why premeditation is permissible for one and not the other.
Furthermore, as community annotators on Genius Lyrics have noted, “talking” can also serve as a euphemism for a casual sexual relationship. In these lines of the verse, it becomes unclear whether the speaker is holding back violent urges or sexual desire. Throughout this narrative, JPEGMafia moans with sexual desperation and makes innuendos about the officer’s words to him, frequently responding with a sensual “whatever you say, officer.” This is perhaps the most profound element of the song. JPEGMafia is noting a sort of lust that white people and the state possess towards the domination of Black people. In his song, he senses the officer is “getting off” on the power of pulling him over. By exaggerating and blatantly calling out this desire, he points to how disturbing and twisted it is. And he actively fights it by taking part in the sexual overtones of the interaction, taking pleasure in it himself.
Theorist and writer Saidiya Hartman theorizes this dynamic in her analysis of the subjugation of the Black body in the United States. In particular, she describes this lust as a “libidinal investment in violence,” noting that during the slave trade, and the founding of institutionalized racism, there exists “traffic between fact, fantasy, desire, and violence,” establishing a libidinal drive in racism that is constructive of the power dynamics that exist and are acted upon today. She argues that within the dominant archive, Black death is relevant sometimes only because of white culture’s erotic obsession with Black people. In the song, JPEGMafia plays with this cultural expectation by conflating the officer’s murderous desire with a sexual one. Furthermore, he subverts those norms by confronting, participating, and enjoying the sexual aspect of it.
Hartman’s analysis of the libidinal dimensions of racialized violence in the US is born out of her work in the archive, where she also conceptualized the practice of critical fabulation. In Hartman’s work, critical fabulation serves to fill in the gaps left by an archive that has captured the subjugation and domination of Black people, but not the rest of their stories. Hartman argues that though the evidence may not suggest this happened, that absence of information also does not suggest it didn’t happen.
JPEGMafia’s narrative of murdering a cop is a profound act of critical fabulation. The basic, but extreme inequality of power between officers of the state and Black people mean that a story like this fundamentally cannot exist. However, that isn’t really relevant, because as of the publication date of this song, especially with its highly discursive and controversial elements that makes it prime for reaching wide audiences, now exists in the archive a narrative in which Black people fought back, and won. This strike against the state may not have happened, but what did was an attack against the structures that keep them oppressed.
The anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot explains that one way of viewing history is through a constructivist lens, in which history relies on various narratives and interpretations of past events. This also means that new narratives can invoke past stories, and in the present those stories can then signify new things. By marrying the murder of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller with JPEGMafia’s own critically fabulated story of murdering a cop in retaliation to white supremacy and state violence, the story of Deputy Dinkheller has taken on a new antiracist significance. Deputy Dinkheller’s death did happen, and it is given a lot of space in the archive. Now, a piece of that space is granted to JPEGMafia’s anti-police, antiracist thought. A Google search for “Kyle Dinkheller” returns mostly police sources, but now amongst them appear links to SoundCloud comment threads, WhoSampled pages, and Reddit discourse. The Wikipedia page for “Murder of Kyle Dinkheller” now includes a description of JPEGMafia’s song as well.
The Song Concludes
Following the “I Just Killed a Cop Now I’m Horny” narrator’s victorious slaying of the police officer, he offers a complex conclusion for his story. First, he contrasts a formerly combative tone with a more earnest voice as he reflects: “Hope the cops don’t shoot my friends.” He steps out of his glorious fabulation into reality, where he acknowledges again the likelihood that a murder in his life will likely be of a Black person and not a white one, let alone a cop. Immediately after he says this, sirens are heard in the background, reasserting that in reality, the police are the aggressors, and not the victims, and that any enactment of violent fantasy towards the police will almost certainly be met with the full force of state power. In this real world, Andrew Brannan– Deputy Kyle Dinkheller’s murderer– was executed. Building upon the reversal of power dynamics made possible by his critical fabulation, he ends the song stepping a away from individual armed resistance towards what feels like a prescriptive call to arms for Black collective action, including one more sample: audio of people participating in a call-and-response chant: “My god and my gun / Your god and your gun.”
In its complete form, “I Just Killed a Cop, Now I’m Horny,” has started a new conversation about police violence and the legitimacy of Black resistance in contemporary American society. To return to Benjamin’s notion of fascistic aestheticization of politics, where spectacle supplants the intimacy and personhood of the victims, creating complacency, a response is suggested: the politicization of art, such that the art itself evokes a political reaction. In this reading, JPEGMafia has mastered the latter. His art, controversial and disturbing, “the most fucked up shit,” by JPEGMafia’s own admission in the song, succeeds in destabilizing the expected avenues of discourse around antiblackness and police brutality.
By inverting the stereotypical script of police brutality, transforming the cop into the victim rather than the perpetrator, JPEGMafia provokes discomfort in the majority of listeners, only to prove that this reaction is fundamentally unjustifiable because it indicates a sympathetic alignment with dominant culture. JPEGMafia places the responsibility on those offended by a police officer’s death to explain how the singular audio reproduction of the killing of one white officer– whether in the sampling of audio of Deputy Dinkheller’s death or in JPEGMafia’s fabulated narrative of his own police killing– outweighs the fascistic and widespread reproduction of the excess of images of Black death in our mediascape. Leaving the audience to sit with this irony without himself contributing to the discourse, JPEGMafia questions why the depiction of some forms of violence are off-limits, while others are reproducible.
