Jay Electronica: Hip Hop’s Beloved Anomaly
Currently in Hip Hop, there are a few talented artists who keep such a low profile that we crave their music in any way we can get it; whether it be an album, single, or even song snippet. Some of these artist include J.Cole and Earl Sweatshirt, or legends like André 3000, MF Doom, and Nas. We never know when they’re making new music, so the mystery keeps us intrigued. The leader of this group of mystery is no other than Jay Electronica. The man who is heralded as one of rap’s premier lyricists with only three official songs released to the public.
Not three albums, but three songs. His official discography is 13 minutes and 20 seconds long.
Born Timothy Elpa-Thedford Flowers, Jay Electronica was raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. At the age of nineteen, after the death of a close friend, he left the city to pursue his rap career. After being homeless, moving from city to city, performing in clubs, he eventually made industry connections with producers like Just Blaze and the late J. Dilla; thus recording music.
Jay began to gain traction in the hip hop scene following his release of “Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)”; a 15 minute track containing five parts that entirely sampled the award winning film score for ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’. The track was a very original concept and Jay’s verses phenomenally displayed his lyrical ability over the symphonic chords. It was posted on his Myspace page in 2007 and received lots of critical acclaim. Following this, he eventually uploaded his ‘Style Wars EP’, which included stand out tracks like ‘My Uzi Weighs a Ton’ and ‘Dimethyltryptamine’, as well as his project ‘Attack of The Clones’ in 2008.
Then came ‘Exhibit A’, a Just Blaze produced lyrical escapade that became one of Jay’s three official singles. He later released his mixtape “What the F*ck is a Jay Electronica” in 2009, which was a compilation of previously released and new tracks. Later that year, ‘Exhibit C’ was released, a classic Hip Hop song that cemented Jay Electronica into the rap game. Jay says that he and Just Blaze made the track just 15 minutes prior to being premiered on Angela Yee’s radio show on Shade 45. ‘Exhibit C’ climbed its way into the top 10 hip hop on iTunes hip hop charts. In 2013, Complex.com listed the song at #1 on their list of 30 most lyrical rap songs of the last 5 years.
Then the problem arose with the release of Jay Electronica’s debut album “Act II: Patents of Nobility (the Turn)”. The problem being, it never came out.
The project has not had a formal release date, only inklings of information, rumors, and false hope over the past 8 years. Following Exhibit C’s success, Jay said that he wanted to drop the album on Christmas of 2009. That clearly didn’t happen. A year later, in an interview with DJ Semtex, he claimed that the album was nearly finished and he is pushing to release it on his birthday, September 19th, 2010. That of course didn’t come into fruition. Later that year, he signed with recording company ‘Roc Nation’.
A year and a half goes by with some more songs being released here and there like ‘Fatbellybella’ (dedicated to Erykah Badu, his former girlfriend and mother of his child),‘Shiny Suit Theory’ ft. Jay-Z, as well as a soothing collaboration with The Bullitts called ‘Run & Hide’.
Jay looked to finally end all of the waiting, tweeting on March 8th 2012:
But obviously, the wait continued because here we are still with no album.
A few months after, Jay Elec tweeted a screenshot of the tracklist for Act II that he immediately deleted right after. It included features from Kanye West, Jay-Z, and P. Diddy. This gave fans hope of the album existing, but many assumed it was just another rumor. Years went by, more songs surfaced online every year or so, but still no album. Jay did, however, continue to regularly kill features for artists; like his verses on Big Sean’s ‘Control’, PRhryme’s ‘To Me, To You’, and recently Chance The Rapper’s ‘How Great’. Now, in 2017, he continues to tease Act II.
During an interview with Bud Light Crew HQ, in regards to the album, Jay Elec said, “Nobody in the world don’t want a Jay Electronica album out more than I do”. When asked what is stopping him, he says nothing is, he simply releases music on his own time and that he is constantly changing and evolving the project. Then in an interview with Billboard, when asked what it would take for him to finally put the project out, he replied:
“When it’s finished. When it’s something that I’m pleased with because regardless of the six billion people on planet Earth, even if I put something out and the whole six billion say it’s absolutely beautiful and I don’t feel okay with it, I’m the one that carries that.”
Then in June, he released ‘Letter To Falon’ (Falon being his sister), the first song he has released for sale since Exhibit C in 2009. This is where it gets interesting. If you look back at the tracklist that Jay Electronica posted back in 2012, ‘Letter To Falon’ is track 9 with identical timestamps. This would indicate that the song is at least half a decade old, but could also that that “Act II: Patents of Nobility (the Turn)” could actually be coming soon. But has the wait been worth it?
From that tracklist posted in 2012, we have heard ‘Patents of Nobility’, ‘Life On Mars’ (Fatbellybella), ‘Better In Tune With The Infinite’ ft. Latoya Givens, ‘Road To Perdition’,‘Run and Hide’, and now ‘Letter to Falon’; six of the potential fifteen songs on the project over the course of seven years. Though Jay has such a brief discography, songs like ‘Better in Tune With The Infinite’ and ‘Run and Hide’ solidify his amazing artistry. ‘Road To Perdition’, ‘Exhibit A’, and ‘Exhibit C’ are proof of his impeccable flow and delivery with conscious bars that make you pause the track to think about the lyrics. All the while, still being able to show vulnerability on tracks like ‘Fatbellybella’ and ‘Dear Moleskine’. I encourage people to visit his YouTube page where he has some of these tracks posted. Jay Electronica still has the potential to be one of the better MC’s of our generation, but he can’t do that without releasing music.
It is understood that some artists have long, meticulous creative processes. Some artists get to the end of a project and aren’t happy with the finished product, so they scrap the whole thing and start over. Some labels delay the release of projects, causing a long wait for fans. But this isn’t the case. Jay Electronica has been claiming to be releasing the album and teasing fans for nearly a decade now. He’s clearly been working on the same body of work this whole time because it has stayed consistent with the original tracklist, so it isn’t like he scrapped the project.
Many people have theories of why the project has been postponed for so long. Some say Jay has been ghostwriting for artists for some years now. Others believe that he only makes a few songs every year and is slowly accumulating tracks for the album. It may be that Roc Nation has simply given him full creative capability and hasn’t set a deadline for the project all these years, allowing him to take as long as he needs. We’ve seen this happen with artists like Vic Mensa and Willow Smith at Roc Nation; but of course, nowhere near to the same extent. Labels have the responsibility to set reasonable deadlines so that not only they can profit, but so the fans can also be satisfied. We saw this happen recently with Top Dawg Entertainment; how they handled the dilemmas of album deadlines between SZA and Isaiah Rashad.
I’m more concerned that when it is finally released, how it will be received by the music community? Will it be such a masterpiece that the years of waiting will be worth it? Are the tracks that he’s released just the tip of the iceberg for his potentially amazing discography? Or has he been struggling to top these efforts? I know I will still be patiently waiting for Act II’s release, Jay is too gifted of an artist to disappoint in my eyes. But how long does he expect the rest of his fans to wait?
Did Jay Electronica already miss the window for his success in Hip Hop?
