Jay Electronica

When Jay Electronica broke in the late 2000s, it felt like a little bit of prophecy fulfilled. The talent was obvious: When your first singles are “Exhibit A” and “Exhibit C”, you don’t have to fight for a seat at the table. But Jay’s course never quite seemed clear, even to him: years between tracks, more than a decade before his first album (2020’s A Written Testimony)—who does that unless he thinks he’s really worth the wait? And yet, the music bore out: dense, lyrical, imaginative and deeply earnest. But most of the time Jay just seemed content to play it with a depth others hadn’t—or couldn’t—consider, then duck back into his life. Born Timothy Elpadaro Thedford in New Orleans in 1976, his biography is scattershot, more collage than big picture. New York, Philadelphia, the Mid-Atlantic, Colorado, Atlanta, Detroit. At some point, he joined the Nation of Islam; at another, he signed with JAY-Z. You didn’t hear from him often, but when you did—alongside Kendrick Lamar on Big Sean’s “Control”, with The Bullitts or Mac Miller—he made his voice known. Taken at a distance, Jay’s story plays a little bit like a superhero myth for hip-hop in the new millennium: the quest for authenticity, the commitment to ethic and craft, the sense that, even in a digital world where everything in the culture feels raked over and revealed, there might be dudes like him out there. “Sometimes I was held down by the gravity of my pen/Sometimes I was held down by the gravity of my sin,” he raps on “Ezekiel’s Wheel”, explaining the wait for A Written Testimony. “My only logical option was to transform into the wind.”