Headlines / Who signed every contract and missed the deadlines.”)Īs for the other Jay, the 50-year-old Shawn Corey Carter continues to defy long-held myths about hip-hop longevity, attacking his tracks with vivid volleys of fire and brimstone. (It’s hard to think of another MC who could so casually slide from “Ready to Die” to the Qu’ran: “Remember Rappin’ Duke? Duh-ha, duh-ha / You never thought we’d make it to lā ‘ilāha ‘illā Allah.”) For all the polyglot esoterica that crowds his lyrics, there’s always been something unusually welcoming about Electronica, from the warmth of his baritone voice to the undercurrent of humility that runs through nearly all his music, which is most obvious here when he acknowledges his long stretches of writer’s block. Deftly deploying Arabic phrases alongside scattered Yoruba words and references to “Black Panther,” he makes his entrance with typical flair: “From a hard place and rock to the Roc Nation of Islam / I emerged on the wave that Tidal made to drop bombs.” Electronica was never much of a shouter, but he’s grown even more low-key with age, easing back into a conversational flow that often brings to mind MF DOOM as he unwinds labyrinthine swirls of internal rhymes without ever straining to punctuate them.Įlectronica’s religious faith gives the album its most consistent theme, but he rarely discusses his beliefs with any sense of stridency or proselytization, leavening every deep spiritual reference with a grace note of goofiness or an out-of-nowhere metaphor. True to form, it takes some time on the record for Electronica’s voice to even be heard – preceded by a song-length sermon snippet from Louis Farrakhan and a verse from Jay-Z, who appears on eight of the album’s ten tracks – but when it does, it’s unmistakable. It’s hard to imagine Electronica could have delivered a masterpiece equal to expectations, so he focused on just making a really good rap album instead. Allegedly composed over 40 days and 40 nights – though the presence of the years-old track “Shiny Suit Theory” calls that claim into question – “Testimony” comes across like one long exhalation after a decade’s worth of breathless false-starts and overthinking. It’s to the album’s credit, then, that it never feels as though it’s been overly tweaked and worked over. In that sense, “A Written Testimony” arrived with paradoxical expectations: it was simultaneously the most feverishly anticipated hip-hop debut of the millennium, and also something that virtually no one was still waiting up for. But hip-hop found plenty of new saviors in the meantime, most obviously Kendrick Lamar, who fused gnomic spirituality with acrobatic wordplay and a deep reverence for classic rap tropes in a way that allowed him to take the place at the table that seemed set for Electronica’s entrance. Oh sure, his name would reemerge once in a while, whether he was signing to Jay-Z’s Roc Nation, appearing on one-off tracks alongside Big Sean, Chance the Rapper and Justin Bieber, or becoming an unlikely presence in British tabloids when he pursued a relationship with a married Rothschild heiress. At a lean time for innovative hip-hop, this thirtysomething, formerly homeless Nation of Islam adherent seemed poised to ascend to messianic status.Īnd then, as suddenly as he arrived, Electronica virtually disappeared, his long-promised debut album never materializing. (If some of those terms are unfamiliar to you, that should give you an idea how long ago all this was.) He accrued scores of famous fans, from Nas (to whom his heady, erudite style was often compared) to Diddy and Q-Tip, and his supernova moment seemed to be approaching when a pair of seismic singles – “Exhibit C” and “Exhibit A (Transformations)” – detonated in late 2009. He first attracted attention via MySpace, when his mixtape set to Jon Brion’s “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” score started turning heads and birthing hundreds of breathless posts on mp3 blogs and hip-hop LiveJournal pages. ![]() The only problem? That work never seemed to arrive. Salinger, Jeff Mangum or Arthur Rimbaud – an enigmatic, prodigiously talented figure who felt destined to recede into monastic solitude after dropping a landmark work. For more than a decade, the New Orleans rapper has served as hip-hop’s equivalent to J.D.
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