Who the hell is Jay Electronica?
In a weird way, I get Jay Electronica. Sure it’s taken me a couple days, a quick Twitter beef, and a spontaneous repeat of ‘Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales’ - a very low-profile heartache-anthem by Car Seat Headrest, which I very much doubt has ever entered Mr. Electronica’s cosmic considerations. Right out of Youth Day I got the chance to sample his ‘debut album’, A Written Testimony, on my Friday commute. I was and I do in fact remain bitterly disappointed … but context is great for sweetening the taste of powdered painkiller.
Mr. Electronica, if I may persist, speaks to you as many a rapper does; with the scorn and disregard of someone who knows he’s desperately wanted, awaited. His lyrics, especially on this ‘debut album’, runneth over with self-importance, like a man who has traveled long and far to deliver prophecy. And if over a decade of easeful features, cameos, and mixtape drops are any evidence, he has. You need only hear Electronica ice-skate across a verse - like a Greek god with the flu, with the pomp of a rhinoceros that’s somehow mastered a circus tightrope. This is what a Jay Electronica verse looks like:
Your arms too short to box with the sender of the prophets,
Aviator shades, the stage is a cockpit/
Leather Pelle, lounging at the Sofitelle,
Sipping Sam Pelegrino, eating Ghiradellis/
This is what a Jay Electronica verse sounds like:
All of hip-hop’s finest authors sort of string things together and then see where it all goes. They can pursue the idea or the jangle of a rhyme scheme down the uncertain ravine of a hot verse. That’s what separates a Jay Electronica from a William Blake, that extra ounce of poetic delirium, that blinded quest for sonic resonance and that exquisite release, for listener and spitter, when it arrives. A Jay Electronica verse in particular is rich with hyperactive syllables, which collide at any moment - even before an entanglement in rhyme.
A Jay Electronica verse is as pure as it is effortless, and almost embarrassed by its own authenticity. It looks down on capitalism because money and materialism, also, are too easy. It grasps for the stars of foreign galaxies. It’s not that frequent an occurrence; but an Electronica verse really does threaten moon colonisation shortly after inviting you round for tea.
So what on earth, then, is this record?
*
In the three days since promising a friend I would massacre this album on paper, I’ve also stumbled upon this ancient quote from the man himself. (Thanks, Stereogum.)
“An album is a false concept anyway,” he told Billboard in 2017. “An album is something that was created by corporations as a product to make money.”
A Written Testimony is billed, packaged and ultimately downloaded as a Jay Electronica album - and yet it’s got Jay-Z all over it, even in the imprint of beats whose production is credited to Mr. Electronica himself. We’re to understand Jay-Z (henceforth referred to as ‘Hov’) lobbied and lobbied Electronica to finally drop something, because our guy would rather not make albums anyway, and this is the part I get. It was another awesome band, the Strokes, that sang about wanting to be forgotten on the opening track of a record critics generally panned. I suspect Electronica doesn’t want to be the subject of top five debates, to be on end-of-year lists, or to be measured (and I think this especially) in sales figures or data. That would break the spell: it would imply his concerns about human existence, black existence, his existence, are earthly ones. As ordinary, really, as anyone else’s.
But the subtle cop-out of an album that doesn’t really belong to him … that might actually be worse. There is now a searchable collection of songs in which a rapper of inferior ability and contemplation, because this is what modern Hov is, gobbles up too much of Electronica’s airtime; and helps shroud what little is left in beats whose bombast overwhelms whatever nuggets the album may contain. Hip-hop works best when its lyrics sit atop a beat with aligned and not freeform particles.
I kept waiting for Electronica to pause time, to make history, with something other than an Islamic proclamation and an iron-clad reputation. But how could he, on a project that serves two masters: the process of a) affording Jay-Z a mystical street cred that’s very hard to quantify, and b) affording Electronica access to mainstream audiences. These artistes inhabit different worlds, if you’ve got the clearness of ear to follow an Electronica verse down a wormhole. A Written Testimony is like asking one person to put together a peanut butter & jelly sandwich, only for someone else to slap a fried egg on it.
I dislike this creature. Because it’s only 40 minutes long. Because it’s severely over-produced. Because it professes black intellectualism but doesn’t actually birth any new ideas. But I’m willing to wait, willing to sniff through it some more, because who the fuck knows with Jay Electronica.
A Written Testimony is available to stream on Apple Music and Spotify.
