Graphic via Evan Solano
Ant shall bring disaster to evil factors.
The cracks in our foundation are more visible than ever. The planet is getting warmer and Mars doesn’t seem so bad a place to live as humanity tips into a land of no return. Transmitting from an alternate realm just an atom split away, Jay Electronica sits all powerful grinning at the madness.
The New Orleans-born and Harlem-claiming emcee has frollicked in conspiracies about the end of mankind for 20 years. The bedrock of Jay Electronica’s career is a library of theories revolving around the Illuminati, theology, aliens, a fascination with the experiments of Nikola Tesla, and claims that “the Dominicans control the banks.” He has deep ties to Jay-Z, The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan, and Rothschild heirs despite his back catalog being grainy YouTube exclusive leaks. Up until 2020 he never even released a proper album. As we try to decipher a dump of movie clips and unfinished stream-of-conscious verses the question posed through one his many fan made compilations still remains; What The Fuck Is A Jay Electronica?
Jay Elec-Yarmulke wants you to believe he’s hip-hop’s personal oarfish, scattering townsfolk into a frenzy as seismic change seems to shadow his appearances. When he first touched down in the ballooning rap blogosphere with 2007’s Act 1: Eternal Sunshine, America was in a deep recession with all hope riding on another fresh-faced upstart, Barack Obama. One of his rare features materialized in 2014 on “Control,” an earthquake of a record that would be the Ground Zero for a beef that a decade later would lead to Drake, one of the 21st century’s biggest pop stars, being laughed off his throne. He was among the ensemble for Chance The Rapper’s 2016 mixtape Coloring Book, a record that would reset history as the first self-released project release to win a GRAMMY showing just how irrelevant the major label system was becoming.
After almost 15 years of misdirection and pump fakes, A Written Testimony co-starring Jay-Z was released as his proper debut album just days after the infamous Rudy Gobert interview that acts as a personal line of demarcation for when the COVID pandemic became a world-altering force.
Jay Elec also wants you to believe that he’s among a lineage of hip-hop truth tellers, buried by the omnipresent Powers That Be because he speaks truth to their devilish ways. In the last couple weeks, Electronica has popped from his underwater lair with a new influx of skepticism and raised eyebrows about the death of Michael Jackson, the arrests of Elijah Muhammad, The Battle Of Los Angeles, and alien appearances as revealed under oath to the United States Congress Oversight Committee.
As select songs from these new offerings begin to be zapped off streaming platforms it only adds more fuel to the idea that he is speaking something too powerful for the public to hear. It’s not the fault of Electronica that we as rap fans keep a fresh corkboard and spool of red string on stand by when rappers present new observations on how the world turns, but rather a side effect of hip-hop’s 50-year relationship with distrust of power structures.
Conspiratorial thinking in rap traces back to the culture’s ties to The Five Percent Nation, a Harlem-born religion created in the 1960s whose Black Power rhetoric, distrust of elites, and value for community and spiritual connectivity would trickle into the music of early adopters like Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Just-Ice, and MC Shan. With this worldview baked into the core values and language of hip-hop, it allowed the genre to become a primary incubator and entry point to government distrust for open-minded fans and smoked out college kids the world over.
By way of Wu-Tang Clan, Nas, Ice Cube and Mos Def among dozens of others Black power concepts like, knowledge of self, and drug-fueled spiritual enlightenment have become canonical explorations for rap fans. Plus the existence of public surveillance carried out on private citizens by the government funded companies, the FBI and CIA’s connection to the assassinations and smear campaigns of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X, the War On Drugs, and international sex trafficking rings have been concepts alluded to or spoken of explicitly in rap for generations that have been investigated on long enough to become truths.
Just when the veil seemed to be lifted and there was no more need for tin foil hats, Jay Electronica pulled up on stage to reveal a whole new emerald green curtain. Now as tempting as it may be to view rappers as infallible supreme seers, it’s important to point out that while many fears have been borne out into collective acceptance there’s been even more false ideas big and small peddled out of ignorance, heartbreak and fear. The idea of a Jewish cabal being the sole controllers of the entertainment industry, 2Pac faking his death to kickback in Cuba, owners of private prisons involvement in the rise of gangster rap in the early ’90s, and anything Necro has ever said online come to mind.
So when we peer at Electronica with a skeptical eye rather than one ready to take all words as fact what do we see? Is he really a mythical being with divine timing, or is he just another man we’ve elevated to legend because staring at the truth is too boring and harsh? You can write off his appearances aligning with sacred seals being broken as coincidence out of his control, the general wonder around him as by-product of fallow periods in rap and a fearful public hoping for answers to their prayers.
Are these barren projects and 15-year-old songs timeless relics of human truth and understanding, or are they just demos from a guy who thinks he’s above trying? Act 1 was a heartfelt art rap experiment that tested the intersection of other “high brow” corners of entertainment as an expression of the human experience, but today feels like an unfocused demo rather than a zygote of a new tomorrow. Jay-Z dog walked him across A Written Testimony. This version of Act II is a diminished version of the original leaked/released from 2020, and the chunks left intact still need a proper mix down. When it comes time to peel through the only fresh music within this data dump, the new 20 “songs” holding not even a dozen verses, I could care less.
As many have vaulted his flawed creations, his more inexplicable stances have been minimized. Within his crackpot streams of thought Elec has blared out his own anti-Semitic dog whistles and a shown pride in his relationship with Diddy, refusing to distance himself post-trial, going so far as to use him on the Leaflets intro and shout him out across many of his new records. He rides wholly with Farrakhan and the Nation Of Islam, a group broadcasting wild theories about the “creation of the white race” and homophobia. As for Jay Elec’s songs getting taken down? Copyright Law and cease and desist orders from unpaid producers seems a more realistic answer than Illuminati orchestration. In a world where everyone holds a pocket sized platform to blow fuel into their homemade conspiratorial fire, we’ve evolved past needing another blowhard with an idea of “this is who is really in charge.”
So the question remains, “what the fuck is a Jay Electronica?” The answer: something closer to a comet rather than a mystic rap God. We remember the highs of “Exhibit C” and “Somethin’ To Hold On To” to keep out the thoughts of hatred and self-righteousness he spews.
It’s beautiful to see a comet streak across the night sky because it gives us the same feeling our ancestors once had, of wonder and fear, telling ourselves this rare event is a sign of evil to come, greatness among us, or powers left to be understood. When they burn out and disappear we shouldn’t be disappointed, fearful, or overly praiseful, because that short exposure to beauty is all they ever were meant to give. If they hung around any longer the wonder would fade into indifference the way all things do. With a proper sized catalog for proof, Jay Electronica has stopped being even a comet, now rotating around us as just another speck in the sky.
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