Happy 10th Anniversary to J-Zone’s Peter Pan Syndrome, originally released September 3, 2013.
Jay “J-Zone” Mumford starts off Peter Pan Syndrome with a sermon in the form of “It’s a Trap!” I’ve never been known to be a particularly religious person, but the extended intro makes me want to catch the Holy Ghost. As he addresses his congregation, he unfolds a parable about how “nothing is more responsible for misery than the sound of one’s own biological clock ticking.” He tells of traveling through his thirties, resigning himself to working a corporate job, “french-kissing mediocrity in the back of the Sloth-Mobile,” and putting the pursuit of a pension in front of passion and growth.
These, of course, were real issues that rapper-producer J-Zone was wrestling with at the time. After nearly 15 years in the music industry, things weren’t going as he envisioned. With Peter Pan Syndrome, released a decade ago, he evaluates where he is in his life at the age of 36, and he decides that “growing up is for underachievers!”
Peter Pan Syndrome was J-Zone’s first solo rap-based album in nearly a decade. After A Job Ain’t Nothin’ but Work (2004), he focused on other projects besides his own solo rapping career. These projects included teaming up with Florida-born rapper/producer Celph Titled to form the Bo$$ Hog Barbarians, as well as releasing obscure instrumental projects like To Kill a Hooker: A Motion Picture Soundtrack (2006) and Experienced! (2006).
J-Zone’s most prominent release during this period was the book Root For the Villain: Rap, Bull$hit, and a Celebration of Failure, an auto-biographical account of his career (to that point) in the music industry. It’s an illuminating, hilarious, and often sad book that examines his efforts to carve a successful path as an underground rapper during the early ’00s, only to, in his opinion, fall well short of his goal. He recounted such trials as performing at scantly attended venues and making the decision to have scores of his unsold CDs destroyed due to lack of sales.
Peter Pan Syndrome is essentially a companion piece to Root For the Villain. Or an extended epilogue. The album finds Zone at the proverbial crossroads, grappling with whether to keep pursuing a music career or to move on to the nebulous next phase of his life. What results is a work of genius. Peter Pan Syndrome is thus far the best project hip-hop artists reckoning with their own middle age.
With all the “#HipHop50” discussions currently going on, one should not forget that hip-hop is still considered a young person’s game. Peter Pan Syndrome was released during an era when the artists who were raised on the genre’s “golden age” were hitting their mid-thirties, rapidly approaching their forties. During the early to mid ’10s, there was a growing contempt for rappers who were sticking around past the 1980s and 1990s heydays. Many of these artists who toiled on their blue-collar hustle were faced with the increasing anxiety of being the proverbial “old guy in the club,” as the Chris Rock routine goes. Zone was one of the first hip-hop artists to address these sentiments over an entire project.
Throughout the album, J-Zone incorporates numerous interludes where he and his sidekick/alter-ego Chief Chinchilla (Zone with his voice pitched up) provide running commentary on the proceedings. Chinchilla acts as his barely tamed Id, encouraging bad behavior and talking tons of shit. Zone also incorporates voicemail messages from various friends, collaborators, and peers, many of whom bluntly let him know that it’s time to hang up his mic.
Part of the way J-Zone dealt with becoming disillusioned as a rapper was to re-dedicate himself to a different musical passion. He invested in a drum kit shortly before recording Peter Pan Syndrome and subsequently worked to become a master with the sticks. Overall, the album’s production is immaculate, as he incorporates his live drumming with raw soul and other quirky sample sources.
Zone works his magic on the drum set on nearly every song on Peter Pan Syndrome, including multiple completely instrumental tracks. Zone had included instrumental records on his previous releases, but they were often vehicles for humor. Instrumental tracks “Molotov Cocktail,” “The Drug Song” remix, “Gimme a Hit,” and “Roaches in the Kitchen” are all lively, entertaining endeavors, where Zone, on the drums, backs a collage of live instrumentation and left-field vocal samples.
J-Zone also exhibits his unique brand of biting, off-color humor throughout Peter Pan Syndrome, often based on observational insights which play to the project’s overall themes. On “Crib Issues,” Zone attempts to delicately explain why, even in his mid-thirties, he doesn’t feel comfortable sleeping over at a woman’s house after they engage in sexual relations (“Yo Zone, you know we just alienated the three girl fans we have, right?” Chief Chinchilla quips at the song’s end).
But most of these “funny” songs underscore Zone’s frustrations with how society in the 2010s operated, making many of them quite ahead of their time. On “Gadget Ho,” Zone rails against people’s fixation with their cellular phones and social media, an issue that’s since been exacerbated to absurd levels. “Trespasser” is Zone’s screed against the gentrification of New York City, which has now expanded exponentially and afflicts every major urban area in the United States.
Peter Pan Syndrome also covers Zone’s feelings as an outsider. On “Black Weirdo,” he expresses his consternation that other, often richer, members of the Black population give him the side-eye for eschewing the “Grown and Sexy, white linen on the weekends bullshit!” He further laments, “I can’t stand Tyler Perry! Fuck Steve Harvey suits! / No, I don’t go to church to explore my gospel roots / Fuck ‘’90s R&B, that whole genre was a waste / Can’t screw to Babyface; that whole genre was a waste.”
Zone certainly has enough frustration to spread around. The brief but nastily funky “Jackin for Basquiats” features him robbing a museum of its high-priced “urban” art. The song is ostensibly about: 1. Zone’s disdain for mainstream rap’s fetishization of more “adult” content, and the disingenuous self-congratulating that went along with it. 2. Zone’s contempt for the wealthy profiting off of artists’ creativity. “Artists live in poverty and put it in their work,” he raps. “Now it’s bragging points for bourgeois? Time for a robbery!”
J-Zone also shares mic time with some outside collaborators. “An Honest Day’s Robbery,” a high point of the project, features Zone and Philly emcee Has-Lo trading verses and talking shit as they attempt to find a way to supplement their often meager income as rappers. They go from trying to sell drugs, to running a bogus slip-and-fall scheme at Whole Foods, to burglary, to a full-blown (yet catastrophically unsuccessful) bank robbery. Though it’s all played for humor, Zone is again ahead of the curve as he pushes back on the idea that toiling away at a meaningless job until you reach retirement age is an acceptable solution. He proclaims, “All this ‘honest day’s work’ shit was made up by the rich to keep us proud of being dead-ass broke.”
Peter Pan Syndrome features other extremely impressive guest emcees. “The Fox Hunt,” the album’s first single, features Zone teaming up with the severely underappreciated Breeze Brewin, allowing the pair to execute a 2010s update of Cash Money and Marvelous’ “Find An Ugly Woman.” Zone later reconnects with Celph Titled on “Hog Slop,” where the pair cut loose with some top-choice lyrical smack talk. Zone brings back his Old Maid Billionaire cohort Al S.H.I.D. to drop two murderous verses on “Opposites Attract.” S.H.I.D. rhymes with sinister precision over J-Zone’s best production on the project, bending phrases at lightning speeds.
Zone occasionally lets his two alter-egos take the lead. “Player Potion,” a solo cut/interlude by the album’s aforementioned co-host, Chief Chinchilla, harkens to J-Zone’s deep and abiding love for the DJ Pooh produced St. Ides commercials on the 1990s. It also functions as a continuation of Live at the Liqua Sto (2008), a J-Zone-produced collection of malt liquor jingles featuring prominent underground emcees. Chinchilla basks in his own splendor as he takes a slow ride in a drop-top Caddy to the corner store to cop the nominal Player Potion, flossing to a funk-filled, gangsta-fied track.
Even more entertaining is the bonus track “Mo’ Pork,” fronted by Swagmaster Bacon, the trap rapper on Old Maid Billionaire’s roster (actually Zone with his voice pitched down instead of up). Zone does an excellent job at creating a trap beat, as Swagmaster Bacon spends the song celebrating his two great loves: White women and pork products. Zone’s effort results in one of the funniest songs of the ’10s, as Bacon proclaims, “Rap game got soft ’cause n****s stopped eating pork,” “soy-based meat get you shot around hurr,” and “I ain’t Muslim, I don’t even love fish / And you’re god damn right I finna fuck a white bitch.”
But Peter Pan Syndrome builds to and is centered around the title track, one of the best songs in J-Zone’s catalogue. As a rapper who’s a “new eye-glass prescription from being 40,” Zone lays everything out, exploring his complex feelings about where his career and life are headed, while “the real world is knocking at the door.” He chronicles his unsuccessful efforts to find a career outside of music, vents on how he’s perceived by women as a childless mid-thirtysomething, reflects on his peers getting “real jobs” and raising kids, and fights against constant pressure to “grow up.”
But “Peter Pan Syndrome” isn’t about Zone being broken by outside expectations. As the song progresses, he makes it clear that he’s at peace with his decision to keep recording music, “doing paradiddles in my basement to a metronome,” and possibly never being able to afford to retire. “But the writing on the wall’s legible and plain to see,” he raps. “Maybe all this growing up shit just ain’t for me?” He concludes with a statement that encapsulates the project as a whole: “Yeah I know the real world exists, I just refuse to join it.”
Peter Pan Syndrome isn’t technically J-Zone’s final album, but it’s his grand send-off as a rapper. He released Fish N’ Grits (2016) a few years later, but by his account, his heart really wasn’t into it. The project is more of an extended EP, even more designed to showcase his drumming ability.
Afterwards, he threw himself completely into his career as a drummer. As a member of the funk duo The Du-Rites, he has released seven projects thus far. He’s also one of the most sought-after hip-hop session drummers and continues to work in bands that span many musical genres. He recently released Intoxicated Skull (2023), his final project under the name J-Zone, as part of the Madlib Invazion Music Library Series. In Zone’s words, it’s his “version of a jazz-funk KPM and De Wolfe” library album, to be easily used for TV series or films.
Speaking as someone who’s now a lot closer to 50 than 40, and who still doesn’t know what he wants to be when he grows up, I certainly related to a lot of what J-Zone expressed on Peter Pan Syndrome when it first came out. Truthfully, the album very much still resonates with me a decade later, as I decide what compromises that I’m willing to make in order to balance doing what I love and keeping a roof over my family’s head. Peter Pan Syndrome speaks to that uncertainty like very few projects that I can think of, and shows while there’s never a perfect path, doing what makes you happy is often the right solution.
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