Remember When Jay Electronica Was the Best Rapper Alive?
Jay Electronica has a guest verse on Ransom and Dave East’s project entitled Final Call on a song called “Final Call” and that synergy is so perfect, it reminded me of the spellbinding, mind-blowing verses the Jay Man first came in the game with.
I’m not sure why they didn’t go with the album art Fake Shore Drive‘s Andrew Barber tweeted when he announced the tape because it made too much sense to fashion after the Nation of Islam’s newspaper. The only thing that would’ve made it better is if it came with a bean pie, or at least a good recipe.
The track features a soulful loop and all three rappers come correct, but this feature and the artwork I first peeped on X also got me to thinking about the time Electronica was perhaps the best rapper on the planet.
Let me take you back to the Blog Era, a time of growth for rap music, as hip-hop was dealing with its mainstream success and worldwide appeal that was predictably watering the genre and culture down. Rappers young and old were using the Internet to their advantage, shunning the traditional label system for a more renegade approach to releasing music. They also were using social media more freely than they do these days and weren’t going viral for every little thing now that everyone and their moms has an X or IG account.
And then Jay Elect appears almost like a magician. There was word that J Dilla gave him a pack of beats before his untimely passing in 2006, he was having a child with the one and only Erykah Badu, his music would pop up randomly out of the ether. You didn’t exactly know what he looked like and he repped New Orleans, yet didn’t sound like he was from there. He was an anomaly. He was theatre, something that the game has been missing in this fanatical social media landscape.
So, in honor of a very rare Jay Electronica verse, here’s a list of his 15 most brain-melting songs from the time when he was “the lion, the savior, the messiah, the lamb.”
Angel Diaz
Billboard
