Act II: On Jay Electronica’s long-lost magnum opus
“It’s frustratin’ when you just can’t express yourself. And it’s hard to trust enough to undress yourself.”
There’s a moment on Better In Tune (With the Infinite), ostensibly a rap song that was originally released in 2014, where as many as 93 seconds pass before anyone starts rapping.
The rapper is Jay Electronica, the album is his oft-delayed, long-rumoured but always shelved Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn), and the sample is two-fold: it starts with part of the interview of Elijah Muhammad (itself also known as the History of the Nation of Islam) before moving to the 1939 version of Wizard of Oz and a quote from Professor Marvel.
The song, and the album it’s from, are a slow burn is what we’re getting at — it’s incredibly dense, lyrically impressive and poignant while remaining revealing. It’s a would-be masterpiece and stands in as a masterclass of Jay Electronica’s signature style and appeal. But yes, a slow burn.
Hell, just figuring out the original release date for Act II is a doozy. The album tracklist leaked in 2012, so maybe you’re inclined to say that this is when we were first supposed to hear it, but then you remember that the rapper himself teased it as far back as 2007 when he released Act I, which was a 15-minute odyssey tuned to the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind soundtrack and which somehow featured both Just Blaze and Erykah Badu anointing him as rap’s new superstar. (Seriously lol.) Back then, Jay Elec wasn’t so much the heir to the throne as much as he was already sitting firmly in it, they seemed to say, and we just needed to open our eyes and ears and pay attention.
Or as Jay Electronica puts it later on Act II in Road To Perdition, this new album is the memoirs with no omission. It’s anything but an easy listen, one that never lets up as it brings us along a ride through the depths of the soul of the rap game’s foremost enigma and through the maze of his inner mind.
We say all this to say this: everything about Act II says it shouldn’t work. There are numerous sparse and drumless songs, which stand out even if you factor in that the album might have originally dropped 8–10 years ago (at least) at a time when the drums weren’t as prevalent and central to rap music as they are now. Album guests include Charlotte and Serge Gainsbourg, LaTonya Givens, The Bullitts as well as two others whom the average listener might actually know in Jay-Z and The-Dream. It’s packed with dense (there’s that word again), hazy and intricate verses with far-fetched, or at least dark and opaque, references that rely on biographical, spiritual and religious touch points — and everything in between.
Everything says it shouldn’t work but in the hands of Jay Electronica, rap’s foremost poet laureate and the game’s central hermit, it somehow does.
In a broad sense, Act II will have lived up to its mythical status right until the very end. Because just when we had become convinced it never existed — after something like a decade in purgatory, who could blame us — it appeared out of thin air. First as a leak on October 2 after, apparently, a group of people paid hackers $9,000 for the album files, and then as a proper Tidal-exclusive release.
And suddenly, here we collectively were with two Jay Electronica albums in seven months, two full bodies of work from the reclusive rapper who had been turned into a meme for never, or barely ever, dropping any music. For years, us Jay Elec fans had needed to subsist of random song releases or features, seemingly never following a through line or real logic. For years, we only had Jay Elec Hannukkah, only now we had Jay Electricity too. Suddenly, Jay Elec fans could bump a body of work that Pitchfork deemed worthy of the “Best new music” tag, a distinction that the site also gave to his debut album featuring Hov (this is highway robbery), despite the former not being actually new music.
Suddenly, fans of the rapper were wondering what happens to the debut album when it isn’t the debut album anymore?
Jay might have been born on planet Tatooine with dreams of sand as he raps on Act II’s Letter to Falon, which is one of the few songs that he had officially released before this year, but his rapping style falls firmly in the lineage of the greats. He arrived fully formed as the world-weary big brother who had seen and lived through it all, as the man born Timothy Elpadaro Thedford and with abstract yet vivid lyrics loaded with internal rhyme schemes. Before long, with all of, like, 12 songs to his name (if that many!), he had signed with Jay-Z’s Roc Nation after a bidding war with Diddy’s Bad Boy Records. The messiah was here.
He was here, but then suddenly he vanished. In a decade when most rappers preached (over)exposure over reclusiveness, Jay Elec bucked the trend and preferred scarcity. While rap moved toward a model that rewarded artists for incessant access and prolific output, Jay Electronica operated in scarcity, disappearing for months at a time and opting to make his few public appearances actually mean something — though that’s probably a bit overblown. Because as he’s told Red Bull Music Academy, the thing was always more myth than reality. “I don’t get why people say that,” he said. “I be on Twitter, I be on Facebook. The people that know me, I’m open with them. I don’t know where the mystique thing is coming from. I’m a pretty open person.”
Then again, the mythical and mystical is precisely what the rapper has always dabbled in so it makes sense.
“To stand exposed and naked, in a world full of hatred/Where the sick thoughts of mankind control all the sacred.”
Maybe it was that expectations were always sky-high from the New Orleans rapper? The rap saviour who had been been born in NOLA was from anywhere and everywhere: after homelessness and substance abuse in Brooklyn, Detroit and Philadelphia, Jay embraced the Five Percenters and the Nation of Islam (thus the sample at the start of Better In Tune). Then somehow we learned that he was in the throes of an affair with Katie Rotschild, heiress of the Rotschild empire, when all we really wanted all along was new songs.
Call it fear of failure, writer’s block, or whatever, but Act II was always the masterpiece he could never finish and there are plenty of signs here that the album had never been officially released for good reason. At times, it shows how relatively dated it is with references to (really, all of these) Blackberry Messenger, Tumblr, and Vimeo, yet it somehow doesn’t impede the experience of listening to the album. Jay Electronica’s music is timeless: how else do you explain the sampling of Serge Gainsbourg, who died in 1981 when Jay was five years old, on a rap album? His music is a product of its time but also a snapshot of when it was first recorded.
The album supposedly builds to a climax whose impact ultimately fails because some of the last few songs lack polish: full parts of Nights of the Roundtable, to use only this song as an example, are full of gibberish and clearly show that Jay eventually would have revisited the song in time.
But then again, maybe he wouldn’t have. To what extent do you keep at it? “I’m not a rapper,” he raps on the song, “I’m like an angel on the mountaintop” before the verse moves to the gibberish in what’s surely quite the microcosm for the Jay Electronica experience over the past decade. They’re placeholders, you think. Surely he’ll come back to it to finish the song.
Well, no. Self-doubt and depression are two prevalent themes across Act II, including on this specific song. If the album feels at time unfinished because it is unmixed, has demo vocals or the sound is thin, you realize it’s probably not because Jay couldn’t get around to finishing it but that he never would have finished it. If it feels sad, it’s because it truly is and maybe that’s the point: here is a rapper as talented and gifted as (mostly) any other in history so paralyzed with self-doubt that he couldn’t ever finish his would-be magnum opus. How sad, and how deeply human.
But back to Better In Tune. Over the song’s 4:39 runtime we get a single Jay Elec verse where he details that, a little like Professor Marvel does for Dorothy, he’s trying to get us back home over a sparse beat built around an accordion rocking us right to left and left to right. “It’s frustrating when you just can’t express yourself. And it’s hard to trust enough to undress yourself, to stand exposed and naked,” he raps, “in a world full of hatred where the sick thoughts of mankind control all the sacred.”
Soon enough, you realize Jay Elec is mostly rapping about himself, that he is the one looking to go back home. Wherever that may be. Better In Tune is a masterstroke of confessional and autobiographical rap, the kind that the man made his career on all the way back to Exhibit C, the kind where the rapper draws from his specific situations and the ways they apply universally to mostly everyone else listening. It’s probably, to this day, still the best song Jay Electronica has ever made — even considering all the songs on this Act II album and this year’s A Written Testimony.
It’s just not a song that they’ll play on the radio or in the club. Then again, it’s a Jay Electronica song, so maybe they will.
