There’s the aforementioned tonal tightrope he walks on “Infinite,” but also moments of playfulness: the way he stretches “news” and “shoes” on the opening lines of “New Illuminati,” or the sneering glee when, on “Welcome to Knightsbridge,” he calls himself a “true gentleman” before suggesting Kate Middleton call him when she gets bored with her prince. Its most uptempo beats––“New Illuminati,” “Letter to Falon,” “Road to Perdition”––are its weakest, and sound uniformly cheap.Īs always, Jay’s a deceptively crafty vocalist. That was officially titled Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), perhaps an indication that this trilogy was meant to have slightly left-of-center music. This puts the album in opposition to the frequently punishing Testimony, and to many of the signature Jay Electronica songs from the late 2000s and early 2010s––though not to the project that made him a minor star, his 16-minute session over the various movements of Jon Brion’s score from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. The somber tone is reflected in the production: large swaths of Act II are built on soft drums or absent them all together. For years, the line about “a man on a hectare of land like a fortress” evoked a cheery pastoral image in the context of Act II, I wonder whether “fortress” might be swapped for “prison.” That name on that birth certificate, that ain't the real me”Įven “Life On Mars,” a sweet song which is a minor variation on an internet release called (Erykah Badu’s Twitter name)––and which is built around the same sample as Kanye West’s “Bound 2”––here is cast in a grimmer light. To the lawyers, to the sheriffs, to the judges, But Act II, his would-be magnum opus recorded nearly a decade ago, often takes self-doubt and depression as its subject, in stark opposition to those more assured early songs. In his music through about 2010, Jay’s dual existence between the metaphysical and the unnervingly modern seemed to give him an energy and clarity of purpose. Its title comes from Michael Caine’s opening monologue in The Prestige.Įarlier this year on Testimony, Jay knowingly addressed his decade-long absence, rapping about the pressure he felt to deliver on his considerable promise (“ Hov hit me up, like, ‘What, you scared of heights?’”). (In Discord chats, Jay’s representatives first said they would seek legal action to block the release, but on Twitter the artist was gracious about the album’s reception, and later uploaded it to Tidal.) This is the album that Jay had originally slated for Christmas 2009 the version that appeared over the weekend has the same tracklist as was announced in 2012. The New Orleans-born rapper claimed to be of the spiritual plane, but also turned out to be of this world: After dating the heiress Kate Rothschild, he spent more time in the British tabloids than the studio in the next decade, delaying a much-anticipated debut album to the point where everyone gave up on him, only to finally reappear with a very good Jay Z-assisted album, A Written Testimony, earlier this year.īut earlier this week, that long-lost debut, Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn) finally leaked online after a group of internet users raised about $9,000 to buy and release it, after it had apparently been lifted by hackers. On 2009’s “Exhibit C,” his breakthrough and still biggest hit, Jay Electronica writes his young adulthood as a parable––that of a drunk, depressed wanderer who “shines like grew up in a shrine in Peru,” but who sleeps on trains, starving, mad at Okayplayer headlines.
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