On Saturday’s episode of The Joe Budden Podcast, Budden took a jab at Jay Electronica for how much Jay-Z there was on Testimony. Predictably, this led to frivolous arguments about who washed whom. There are 10 songs on this album, and on eight of them Jay Elect cedes ground to his label boss. The album begins with a speech from Louis Farrakhan, the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, and after a brief jaunt through “Once Upon a December,” that music box song from Anastasia, Jay-Z’s is the first voice you hear. For starters, it isn’t as autobiographical as debuts with canon aspirations tend to be. Testimony doesn’t really look, sound, or feel like a debut album.
In the wee hours of the night, tryna squeeze out barsīismillah, just so y’all can pick me apart? When I look inside the mirror all I see is Mars
When I look inside the mirror all I see is flaws But he also reveals some understandable trepidation, and just a teensy bit of angst, about finally putting an album out into the world. Most of Testimony deals in the standard Jay Elect fare: prophetic teachings, scripture, the divine, death, resurrection. Being strongly identified with an excellent song you made two and a half presidential terms ago is one thing delivering something worthy of your reputation as the savior of rap music on your first outing is impossible. It was as if Jay was rapping with the momentum of history behind him his would-be debut album, Act II: Patents of Nobility (The Turn) would lead the huddled, shutter-shaded, skinny-jeaned masses into a new and sensible age of lyrical rap music.Ī Written Testimony, out last Friday, is Jay Electronica’s official debut, but not exactly the towering, insta-classic masterwork that some might have been expecting. Despite being hookless, word-intensive, and five and half minutes long, “Exhibit C” set the internet abuzz in the age of ringtone and sing rappers, who were dominating the airwaves. Like, say, the subtle shift in flow that ties a line through “bracelet” “spaceships,” “face it,” and “Revelations” on “FYI.” The syntactic variety and exactitude of his writing-as well as the seamless and frequent inclusion of big words like “ dimethyltryptamine”-made him the talk of a blog-rap hype cycle that fully deified him by the time “Exhibit C” came out in 2009. I remember thinking that Jay rapped like a watchmaker, tinkering here and there with small details that few people would notice. Jay Electronica’s debut album has been in the offing for so long that fans first began anticipating it after his first mixtape-his only other complete, honest-to-goodness body of work-which was uploaded to MySpace.Ģ007’s Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge) plays as a single 15-minute track, and on it, Jay lays intricate rhymes about blackness, love, life, spirituality, and self-discovery over different selections from Jon Brion’s Spotless Mind soundtrack. Every week, Micah Peters surveys the world of music-from new releases to bubbling trends to anniversaries both big and obscure-and gives a few recommendations.
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