Excerpt: They call me Jay Electronica
by Diplopotamus
From “Let Me Ride,” originally published in The Point
If I remember my high school English correctly, the American dream is all about self-invention. We have flawed legends and warped creation myths and tales of martyrs felled in retrospectively needless rivalries, all of which play into the way we individually and collectively define ourselves. Rap, which for what it’s worth is likely the last place in America where the American dream still exists, has all of these — but its Plymouth Rock is “Planet Rock” and its Jay Gatsby is Tony Montana in Scarface. Rap trades in self-styled identities the way America does, and if anything does it a little more honestly: accusations about inauthenticity hold little sway here, because it’s acknowledged that rappers are characters, masters of ceremonies to an ongoing spectacle.
Many rappers have sustained spectacles more epic than that of Jay Electronica — Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s thirteen kids and nearly as many arrests come to mind, as does 2Pac’s mid-prison self-rechristening as Makaveli — but few have capitalized so efficiently on the fluidity of rap’s mythology. Electronica first made waves in 2007 with Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), a nine-minute, multi-part piece in which he waxes philosophical over austere, drum-free snippets from a film score by Jon Brion. It’s an impressive gesture, at once pretentious and unaccommodating (rap songs have beats for good reason) and repeatedly jaw-dropping. His rhymes are dizzying, elastic, unexpected; his best verses have a force of rhetorical self-evidence whereby his mispronunciations sound imperative, syllables bend to the momentum of his husky voice, and words that are obvious rhythmic placeholders seem like crucial new slang. On the final verse of “Exhibit C,” probably the best pop song of 2009, he lurches into a multilingual, pan-theological boast; on the radio-rip version that circulated on the internet before the track’s official release, the DJ actually rewinds it on air to hear it again:
They call me Jay Electronica
Fuck that, call me Jay Elec-Hanukkah, Jay Elec-yarmulke
Jay Elect-Ramadan Muhammad asalaamica
Rasoul Allah subhanahu wa ta’ala through your monitor
My Uzi still weigh a ton, check the barometer
I’m hotter than the motherfucking sun, check the thermometer
But Electronica’s popularity, which culminated in his recent signing to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, is predicated just as much upon his mysterious persona — one best described as an absence of fixed persona. In his rhymes he can be prophetic, thuggish (nigga, fuck your blog); playful, boastful (I started dropping jewelry / Her eyes went googly / She went home and Googled me); romantic, confessional (At nighttime all I do is pray and cry, homey / ’Cause every time I call home somebody dyin’ on me); political (And every time I look around somebody lyin’ on me / Mr. Cheney, Mr. Ridge, steady spyin’ on me); autobiographical; or simply clever for the sheer exercise of it (Jay Electrolysis, probing the globe like a geologist / Putting all of you pussies on display like gynecologists).
As a character, though, he is equally difficult to pin down. Off record, he perpetuates his sense of mystery in an aloofly industrious kind of way: until now he has released almost none of his music through conventional channels — a guest verse here, a track leaked on MySpace there. While we wait for his long-promised first full-length album, Act II: Patents of Nobility, to materialize, fans dutifully compile his output on unofficial mixtapes. (The best of these so far is Victory, mixed by DJ Dub and Furious Styles.) The advantage of putting out his music in this piecemeal way is that it has started to seem almost natural that, from song to song and moment to moment, Jay Electronica is never quite the same person. Plenty of rappers have multiple voices, but his have never felt like departures from or variations on a central one. In radio interviews he is polite and enthusiastic and down-to-earth; in his press photos he is in Nepal, being hoisted in the air among monks.
