By Frazier Tharpe

Copyright gq

Hug your loved ones. Clear that bucket list. Shoot that shot. As if we needed any more signs that imminent doom is on the horizon, Jay Electronica, music’s foremost harbinger of societal collapse, has reappeared with a fully loaded clip of new music that he’s been dropping at a dizzying pace.
Some context, for those not familiar with the joke: The New Orleans rapper first gained buzz around 2007-08, quickly becoming one of the most intriguing and highly revered wordsmiths in contemporary hip-hop. He’s also regarded as one of rap’s greatest What Ifs, because he never quite harnessed his buzz to become a truly active, consistent contributor to the game. Instead he chose mystique and reclusivity, emerging from a bidding war in 2010 with a plush deal at Jay-Z’s Roc Nation only to promptly disappear and only re-emerge for features, loosies, and freestyles when he feels like it. In the meantime, whispers about his strange and often random movements only boosted his mythology—like that time he had an affair with Kate Rothschild that resulted in the end of her marriage. He finally got around to dropping his debut album, A Written Testimony, ten years later in March 2020 (which, honestly lived up)… about a week before the pandemic.
So, to recap: Jay Electronica first materialized right ahead of a historic financial crisis, then returned to give us new music to listen to during a global months-long quarantine. Now, he has once again unceremoniously returned, conspicuously as our current political climate approaches powder-keg levels of volatility.
At least we’ll have an interesting soundtrack for it all. Jay presaged the flood of new music by officially adding an old staple in his discography, Act II: Patents of Nobility, to streaming last Thursday. Since then he’s dropped three EP-length projects that feature a random assortment of guests like Westside Gunn, DRAM and Drake’s one-time “ghostwriter” Quentin Miller, and content-wise, everything you’d expect from Electronica music: bars about the Nation of Islam and [the honorable] Louis Farrakhan, mystical bon mots, casual affirmation of various conspiracy theories, and jaw-dropping blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-lines such as “I lived with Puff and Cassie but never showed up in the affidavit.” (My favorite on first-listen is probably Power at the Rate of My Dreams.) Diddy also provides the opening monologue to one of the projects. Encouraging words from Sean Combs are on one hand a familiar recurring theme across Jay Elect songs and albums—Combs very bitterly lost the bidding war to Jay-Z—but in a post-trial context, hearing him here is kind of a jump scare.
Most of these songs have attention-baiting titles like, “@RealCandeO Tell Us More” or “Is It Possible That The Honorable Elijah Muhammad Is Still Physically Alive???” but the actual song content doesn’t always deliver on that promise. That latter song has one of Jay’s best verses across the new music but on first listen, has absolutely nothing to do with what the title implies, until it gives way to NOI minister Dr Wesley Muhammad running down the history of Elijah’s life. “Remember That One Time Trump Tweaked on Zelenski In the White House” is just an automated Siri-like voice reading a Jay Elect tweet. There are several other songs like that, and other minutes of runtime dedicated to clips from things like UFO press hearings. Which is all to say, it’s every bit the heady listen most Jay Elect projects—with the exception of A Written Testimony—usually are.
And there may be much more on the horizon. On one of the tracks, Jay Elect makes a public apology to Jay-Z, promising to pay Jigga back for his patience with 19 finished projects. So we’ll have 16 new Jay Electronica albums to soundtrack the end of the world. Good deal?