By Genre: Hip Hop
Favorite tracks: “Shiny Suit Theory,” “Universal Soldier,” “The Blinding,” “A.P.I.D.T.A.”
I thought Jay Electronica was gonna pull a DETOX. At some point, for artists lagging on a much-hyped follow-up (or in this case, debut), pulling a DETOX becomes an option. And with its advantages, why wouldn’t you take it? Even at Jay Electronica’s peculiar interstice in hip hop, he could’ve forgone this onerous task for fabled cache, dropping the occasional verse, even another mixtape, just to let people know he’s still got it without ever having to truly let down. After all, what something is can never surmount to what could’ve been. So here we are, his long-awaited formal introduction, A WRITTEN TESTIMONY. The good news is that it’s fine! The bad news is, also, that it’s fine.
At first there was a hint that maybe Electronica was really cashing in on the fanfare, showing off a calculated and cunning modesty by having Jay-Z open with the first verse. As in, “Yes, I’ll make you wait longer, but here’s a Hov verse.” Things were looking good. That is, until it’s revealed that this is not a device to strut, but a crutch. Had it been cleverly employed once, maybe twice max, I would’ve accepted it as SDE (Stately Dick Energy), but with Jay-Z appearing on EVERY track but one (barring the sampled intro), A WRITTEN TESTIMONY becomes barely a solo record, at times threatening to disown its prime author as a co-contributor. Does Hova’s presence invalidate the entire album? No. Is it misleading and a little disappointing? Yes, and in turn, pretensions like, “My debut album feature Hov, man / this is highway robbery” or “Tell us who your favorite now,” feel impolitic, as if you’re forgetting which Jay we all came for.
That major criticism aside, A WRITTEN TESTIMONY undoubtedly would’ve had a better leg to stand on had it been released 10 years ago. It’s the kind of album that would’ve been swiftly canonized for the virtuosity on display, Electronica providing much of the work behind the boards as well. But in 2020, it’s a mistake. The beats are on-brand, spartan and straightforward, but lending themselves to antiquity isn’t strategic when your only mixtape came out 13 years ago. For someone like ‘Ye or Jay-Z, or even newer heads like Young Thug, regression can play as progression. Not for Electronica, though, as there’s hardly a career span to analyze. It’s hard to justify being in the lab for so long with such little experimentation to show for it.
His loyalty to classicism isn’t a total undoing; these anachronistic tendencies sometimes spill into refreshing newness, like on the choppy “Flux Capacitor” or “Universal Soldier,” which finds Electronica rhapsodizing his professional journey; oneiric, roving, and tinged by blissed-out vocals and the samples of children cheering, it’s a fittingly spiritual centerpiece. Also consider “Shiny Suit Theory,” Electronica’s unhurried flow aptly kept afloat by the beat’s looped progression of xylophone to drums to horns as he drops lines like “Treat my ladies lady-like” and “Hit’em with a remix to make sure they play me twice.” He’s still extremely fun to listen to with his water-snake-toy prosody—including all the religious raps—where it really seems the words are rendering as they come to him, like graphics in an old Grand Theft Auto.
So much rides on the debut, in hip hop especially, and we forget just how much can be at stake. Electronica’s illumination of these warring thought processes occurring is fascinating. On “The Blinding,” a much-welcomed Swizz Beats collab, Electronica recognizes his Catch-22:
“40 days, 40 nights, tryna live up to the hype / …Know your sister tired of working, gotta do her something nice / …when I look inside the mirror all I see is flaws… when I look inside the mirror all I see is Mars… In the wee hours of night, tryna squeeze out bars / Bismillah just so y’all could pick me apart?”
There’s insecurity, there’s family, there’s the brobdingnagian blank canvas, and then there’s all that could, or couldn’t, come after. It’s overwhelming and it isn’t until dozy closer, “A.P.I.D.T.A,” that he stops trying to hurdle it. Jay-Z is thankfully relegated to the chorus, giving Electronica space and time to lay down and organize his ever-trickling musings. He averts his attention to his late mother, honing in on this theme of creation—creation of man, of art, of memories—and with a solemn tone, he hails to it: “The flesh we roam this Earth in is a blessing, not a promise.” Tying this back to his mother, his creator, there’s a sense of regret and lost time—that the opportunity he was gifted was perhaps, for lack of a better term, blown.
It’s a sad but extremely profound point to close on, so much so that I almost feel bad for asserting that a lot of A WRITTEN TESTIMONY was wasted on Hov air time. And it’s all a matter of time, isn’t it? With all that’s passed, you’re either going to amass a heaping amount of wisdom to create something wholly transcendent of any sound wrought by the last decade of music, or you stick to your guns and assume the game wants whatever you were pitching first. Electronica has primarily opted for the latter, for better and for worse (particularly when he side-steps for his Roc Nation elder). On “Shiny Suit Theory,” both Electronica’s shrink and Puff Daddy provide guidance, covertly and overtly, respectively: “It’s a feeling they’ll never know,” “Fuck the underground, you need to win a Grammy for your mama and your family.” He couldn’t not drop this thing even if he wanted to. That it’s off his chest is an accomplishment; that he couldn’t trust himself to lift it alone is a failing.
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