The Legend of Jay Electronica

February 7, 2020

“Album done .”

“Releasing in 40 days”

“Recorded over 40 days and 40 nights, starting from Dec 26”

“…my debut album featuring Hov man this is highway robbery”

“A Written Testimony”

Five tweets. It took five tweets to set the hip hop world on fire.

In order to appreciate where we are, we have to understand how we got here. Not here, the socially distanced world we’re living in right now, but here, as in this moment when after more than a decade of waiting, Jay Electronica has dropped an album — something I wasn’t sure I’d ever get to say.

“I took Eternal Sunshine and I looped it, No drums no hook, just new shit”

New Orleans rapper Jay Electronica first rose to underground hip hop prominence in the late-2000s when he dropped his first mixtape, Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), on MySpace. Even on first listen, you could tell Jay was different than other conscious rappers at the time. He was a bard, regaling us with his journeys and the beliefs and thoughts he’d derived from them. An old-world sense of grandeur coupled with poetic and meticulous lyricism is something that has carried throughout all of his work, but it started…