Every other week, when Brooke’s not holding it down, I’ll be writing an Editor’s Note. I’ll try and use my space to write about things that I think are good. Now, enough about that.
Hopscotch is on the horizon—all you need to know about that you can find herein Recess—and 9th Wonder, Duke professor and hip-hop producer, is curating his own club for the festival.
I had the opportunity to take 9th’s course last semester, and aside from the chance to make a fool of myself at the helm of his turntable, the class watching and trying not to laugh, my favorite takeaway from 9th was his obvious passion for hip-hop. One guy he was passionate about: Jay Electronica.
A rapper from New Orleans, Jay comes with all the baggage that implies. New Orleans rap is becoming a genre in and of itself: long have rappers worked seemingly with whole neighborhoods, cities and coasts on their back. But at least in the past, they could convincingly point blame to help bear the weight. There were suppressors that needed indicting, and often, the indictments were justified.
But how do you face the brunt of a hurricane? That’s hardly a foe worth igniting yourself against, and getting indignant over the aftermath isn’t quite the same. Nothing’s forceful like a force of nature.
Electronica’s approach is to become the hurricane. Contrary to Wayne’s hectic, free-association style, his Joycean mania, Jay has the most deliberate and powerful delivery of any rapper in recent view. Anyone who has even the slightest interest in hip-hop, the smallest desire to be dazzled, go to YouTube right now and cue up “Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge).”
What you get is just over 9 minutes of virtuoso wordplay atop a looped clip from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack—not the first source you’d expect a rapper to stretch. But, in four primary segments, broken up by snippets of dialogue from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and kids yelling in another language, Jay pours out a remarkably cogent, unbelievably fast torrent of rhymes about Judaism, Islam, Voodoo, UFOs and a dozen other scattershot topics.
If Lil Wayne’s modernism, Electronica’s postmodern, welding Doom’s schizophrenia to the weapons-grade focus of Nas or Jay-Z. And there are others, don’t worry.
“Uzi Weighs a Ton” is a twist on a classic Public Enemy track, produced by none other than Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, and it’s a burner—compared to “Eternal Sunshine,” Jay more or less saunters around the stuttering, shaker-anchored beat, and the canted weight of the Uzi sounds just as much a lamentation, a weary statement of fact, as it does any sort of boast or machismo. Where other artists might advertise their gunpower for its own sake, Electronica just seems like he wants to put the weapon down, as though he has no choice but to wield it.
After this, check out “The Ghost of Christopher Wallace,” a new single enhanced by Diddy’s yelling goofily all across the track, and his verse on “The Day,” the best song off of Curren$y’s Pilot Talk, the year’s best rap album so far. Until Jay breaks from his idealism and records an album, you’ll have to subsist on these, and his earlier, seemingly accidental mixtapes. Not that these aren’t worth possessing on their own. Enjoy.
—Kevin Lincoln
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