Jay Electronica Full Album
Gene Honnette
Is it through the amount of airplay by the hottest radio stations? Is it the number of people vibing to the tracks at lit Las Vegas nightclubs? Or is it about how many times it hit the top spot on the Billboard 200?
The album by the German electronic dance music ensemble was a collection of live versions of Kraftwerk masterpieces. From Autobahn all the way to Tour de France, it was all there for your looping pleasure.
The discography of American rapper Jay Electronica consists of two studio albums, two compilation albums, one extended play (EP), three mixtapes, six singles and eighteen guest appearances. His breakout project, Act I: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge), was released on July 2, 2007, while his first song to appear on a chart was 2009's "Exhibit C". Electronica made his first appearance on the Hot 100 with the song "Jesus Lord" from Kanye West's album Donda in 2021.
In terms of style, acidchains is 21st rave music is kind of the tagline but there is really a melting pot of style, while acid basslines inspired by the Bass machine TB-303 is definitely used outright.
On first couple of tracks there is an innocence and almost a pop sensibility. In other instances, there are qualities of abstraction and psychedelia. There is a lot going on synthetically, to keep the listeners interest.
On Nebo Discovery, I use fat, thick beefed up 909 inspired drums and there are variations of these kind of drums throughout the album. I think there is something juice and jagged about the analog emulated synths here and I really like that I modulate them throughout the track to keep interest. It is a very melodic track and has some harmonics.
Rebel Shot is me having fun. I love using chords that implicate and instill fear. I have FM bassline and an old funk feel to the groove rolling bassline and I use a lot of diminished chords and lines with different percussion and other instrumentation. I use a good deal of effects on this track. I use a vocoder here.
Dreams Come True is based on the same template as could be worse but I change the manner in which the drums interact and I use some celesta. I truly believe that this one has an inspring sound. As though someone just looking and wishing at the stars as their dreams come true. I enjoy creating uplifting tracks sometimes.
Cherry Dew Drops has a dark tinge yet there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Here I experiment with the textures of drums and contrast that with much brighter instrumentation and synth and effects.
No Use Hiding this is my Venetian Snares/Aphex Twin influence glowing in full effect. Loads of instrumentation and synths, effects, panning. A lot of texture work and a lot of precision of drum samples. I went over this track with a microscope.
I AM is an ode to the Chemical Brothers/Fluke Big beat/Break beat Acid style. I wrap the album with this track and it has a really thick Juicy acid line on dense breakbeats and massive Vangelis evolving, inspired strings.
Some (including himself) already consider him to be one of the best rappers around, a once-in-a-generation talent. Dropping an album that could never reach impossible expectations would only hurt that reputation. (Something I believe Andr 3000 understands.)
Christopher Pierznik is the author of 9 books and has contributed to numerous websites on a variety of topics including music, sports, movies, TV, personal finance, and life. He works in corporate finance and lives in northern New Jersey with his family. His dream is to one day be a member of the Wu-Tang Clan.
From another artist, statements such as these could easily be dismissed as hyperbole. But in 2021, Noname scrapped the release of her previously announced album Factory Baby, citing frustrations with the industry that were making her reconsider her career in music. View that post below, archived by Okay Player.
Back in 2002, I was working at a radio station called Live 105. It was San Francisco\u2019s alternative rock outlet, and every summer it staged a big concert called BFD. That year\u2019s lineup was a real hodgepodge; headlined by nu-metal acts P.O.D., Rob Zombie and Papa Roach, the bill also featured Cypress Hill, N.E.R.D. and The Strokes, not to mention alt-rock filler like The Vines and Hoobastank, breakout emo acts Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, pop-punkers No Use for a Name, New Found Glory, Unwritten Law, Face to Face and Goldfinger, UK rock outfit Ash and Icelandic rap-rockers Quarashi. (Even looking through the lens of today\u2019s playlist-driven, \u201Cgenres don\u2019t matter\u201D climate, it seems bizarre that all of these acts were all in rotation at the same radio station, but 2002 was a very weird time for the \u201Calternative\u201D format.)
That wasn\u2019t all. The Subsonic stage, named after the station\u2019s Saturday-night electronic music program, included trance DJs from the Bay Area rave scene (Mystr\u00EB, Dyloot, Tom Slik, Thomas Trouble), along with LA prog duo Deepsky, drum & bass stalwart Dieselboy and NYC hip-hop turntablists The X-Ecutioners. Headlining the stage that afternoon was none other than superstar DJ Paul Oakenfold, whose debut solo album, Bunkka, was due to be released just a few weeks later.
Most people don\u2019t remember Bunkka, and for good reason\u2014it wasn\u2019t very good. Although Oakenfold was already one of electronic music\u2019s most well-known figures\u2014he\u2019d previously nabbed the #1 spot in DJ Mag\u2019s Top 100 DJs list in both 1998 and 1999\u2014the album was a clear attempt to cross over into the mainstream. Released in the US by Maverick Records\u2014a Warner Bros. subsidiary co-founded by Madonna\u2014the LP frequently veered away from the trance and progressive house sounds for which Oakenfold was primarily known, venturing into pop, hip-hop and trip-hop with a motley crew of all-star collaborators that included Ice Cube, Nelly Furtado, Jane\u2019s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell, Tricky and rapper Shifty Shellshock (of Crazy Town). Someone even convinced a 60-something-year-old Hunter S. Thompson to appear on the record.
Although Bunkka was greeted warmly by a few publications\u2014funnily enough, a nascent Resident Advisor made a point to highlight the Tiesto remix of the song \u201CSouthern Sun\u201D in its positive review\u2014the album was largely panned, with many of the harshest critiques coming from the mainstream outlets the record was seemingly designed to win over. Entertainment Weekly called Oakenfold \u201Cthe Wal-Mart of DJs\u201D while giving Bunkka a D grade, while the AV Club noted that the LP was \u201Cbogged down by ambitious aims that translate blindness as blandness.\u201D
Twenty years later, those two tracks undoubtedly continue to populate an untold number of bland playlists, but few people associate them with Bunkka, or even remember that Bunkka existed. Oakenfold never really became a household name\u2014at least not in the US\u2014but he\u2019s continued to do just fine for himself; critical acclaim has remained largely out of reach, but he\u2019s spent the past two decades touring the globe, occasionally releasing music and generally enjoying his position as one of commercial electronic music\u2019s elder statesmen. Few would cite Bunkka as a career highlight, but despite the album\u2019s status as a historical footnote, it\u2019s still something of a remarkable artifact, for one main reason: its release was arguably the last time that the mainstream music industry attempted to break \u201Celectronica\u201D in the US.
He speaks of his silence publicly while making what some would view as chess moves in his movie without speech. Jay-Z also mentions destroying the system or civilization from within rather than from outside attack which is how he has operated by creating his own streaming service, record label, and most notably NFL collaboration. Jay-Z has no social media and does not use that as a modern tool to make the changes he wants to see. As he explains in his lyrics he moves in the aged system how it is aligned in order to structurally shift it while remaining a part of it.
Through these two sets of lyrics, we learn that both Jay-Z and Jay Electronica experience grief in a similar fashion. Through this song exploring the experience of grief, we learn that grief itself is the true fuel to fight in the now. This song truly becomes the final statement of the essay and album. It claims that through the grief felt universal, we must fuel our effort to better the world in which we live and destroy the systems that oppress. The most important thing to realize is that people with the same intention are people we must learn to fight beside rather than against.
There are so many things to talk about with the thought-provoking album, including heavy references to the polarizing Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation Of Islam, the ingenuity of his 11th hour live stream (which other artists should consider to build hype for their project), and the reality that the release of an album few had faith in dovetailed with a health epidemic straight out of a religious text. But here are my other biggest takeaways from the momentous project:
Andre Gee is a New York-based freelance writer with work at Uproxx Music, Impose Magazine, and Cypher League. Feel free to follow his obvious Twitter musings that seemed brilliant at the moment @andrejgee.
After an absolutely raucous half hour, the man of the hour leisurely made the rounds through his audience, who circled around him like apostles whose messiah has just been revealed to them. I dapped him up, and told him not to worry about the people asking what was keeping his debut album. That I appreciated what he did, and that hiphop what eventually be thankful, precisely because he was taking the time it needed.
Electronica grew up in New Orleans until the age of 19. In the many years that followed, he traveled between Baltimore, New York City, Detroit and Atlanta. New York was one of the cities that his album listening party was scheduled to take place, however, it was canceled due to the widespread of the coronavirus.
c80f0f1006