When, on “ Exhibit B,” Yasiin Bey vowed to “put your yard up on knowledge like the lessons do,” it served not only to ground the song in a particular perspective, but to pinpoint the aesthetic school that Jay was coming from as a rapper. This provided a kind of lingua franca for Jay and his high-profile collaborators in the early days. Jay’s music has long been studded with references not only to the Quran but to the Black Muslim and Five Percenter cultures that have shaped many American cities-and have permeated rap since its beginnings. Though he is circumspect about the timeline or exact details of his personal life, Jay at some point in his early 20s became a member of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan has in the past defended him from criticism. The phrase ‘drew Ali’ also functions as a pun on the name of Noble Drew Ali, the founder of the Moorish Science Temple of America-a typical tic.
JAY ELECTRONICA ALBUM FULL
Jay’s rhymes, full of allusion to rappers and rap songs of the past, were also in conversation with the Malcolms and Martins and JFKs and Jackies, or more specifically with the way Americans had abstracted those people into myth. The comparison to Warhol made sense: in his writing, Jay loves to reduce historical or cultural figures to their iconographic essences, then bleed those for his own purposes. Say, ‘A painter with a felt pen, who drew Ali.’” Artists are not typically the best diagnosticians of their own work, but on “ Swagger Jackson’s Revenge,” a terse exercise released during the first Obama campaign, Jay Electronica rapped, That tense, unbroken string of admissions is gripping in part because it’s in such stark contrast to most of his past work. (In Jay’s case, “thin air” occasionally meant “the British tabloids who documented the way be broke up the marriage of a Rothschild heiress.”) Jay Electronica, whose raw stated ambition, supernatural skill, and rolodex made with voodoo seemed to prime him for some sort of greatness, vanished into thin air. Jay signed to Roc Nation, dropped a single with Jay-Z and another where Puff ad-libbed between the verses.
At first there were promised releases and sheepish delays, and then there was silence. You would be forgiven for believing the vacuum was filled.Īs you may know, Act II never came out. Even the classicist lane was filled by Kendrick Lamar, a technical wizard with a flair for myth.
The 2010s would not be spent searching for the heir to Nas and Jay-Z who could rap over Just Blaze and Dilla and channel the pioneers they would be spent watching Future bend technology to wrap around his heartbreak, Chief Keef and Young Thug search for the outer bounds of formal structure, B and his descendents scoff at the notion of structure all together. That same night, December 22, Lil B released 6 Kiss online, as sure a signal as any that the next decade in rap would mark a jagged break from the one before. This strange, self-assured nomad from New Orleans had slept on trains and scrounged for Greyhound tickets and was finally here, on the precipice. This seemed appropriate: the master, unbothered, slipping into prayer while the world fractured around him. Jay had settled on cover art for the single: a photo of Nikola Tesla perched calmly under a burst of electricity.
This announcement coincided with the commercial release of “ Exhibit C,” the expansive, Billy Stewart-flipping salvo that he’d debuted on the same radio show a couple months prior. On the morning of December 22, 2009, Jay Electronica went on Angela Yee’s satellite radio show to announce that his debut album, Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn), would drop on Christmas.
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