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Jay Electronica: A Spotless Mind :: An MC’s mystery revealed

By Jesse Serwer   Photography by Phil Knott

02/21/08 :: URB 152

Almost as soon as we begin our interview at Brooklyn streetwear shop Boundless NY, Jay Electronica decides that the only way to properly tell his story is to hop a Greyhound to New Orleans. “Let’s eat, meet my mom. Let her tell you what happened to her in the hurricane…”

While this plan ultimately goes unrealized due to his impending trip to Israel with Erykah Badu and the time constraints of magazine publishing, Jay is dead serious, and he follows up several days later with a phone call to see if it’s still possible. Interviews are too forced, he argues, which is why he has, up until now, avoided doing them.

“If I never talk to you again and then I see you in the street or at a party and say, ‘What up, that’s the guy who did such and such,’ that’s bullshit,” he says. “That’s not real life.”

In recent months, the 31-year-old MC, who’s spent the past dozen years roaming nomadically between nearly as many cities, has emerged as hip-hop’s first real enigma of note since the rise of MySpace and MP3 blogs made ubiquity an imperative for all rappers on the come-up. But turning down interviews and holding back on the web (he doesn’t have a website at the moment and deleted his MySpace account) wouldn’t exactly be a formula for success if he didn’t already have the Internet and insiders alike going nuts over his music, and his unique approach to releasing it.

Debuted through his now-defunct MySpace page last year, Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge)—the first part of a trilogy, which will culminate in his debut album, Abracadabra: Let There Be Light—served as most people’s introduction to the world of Electronica. Built entirely from Jon Brion’s haunting score for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, five “tracks” play across one 15-minute MP3. Following legend-stoking monologues about Jay from co-signers Just Blaze and Erykah Badu (who explains that he looks like an alien and “a mythical creature who’d have a bow and arrow on his back and wings under that bow and arrow”) cryptic sound bites (including one from 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) intersect with lyrics tackling everything from a break-up to France’s decision to reopen their files on UFOs. With no drums in the mix, it’s up to Jay’s cadences to hypnotize the listener.

“I’m very influenced by movies,” Jay says, explaining his motivation for the project. “There’s a scene [in Eternal Sunshine] when Jim Carrey’s character has just met Clementine, and she’s invited him up for drinks. It was the first time you saw him excited, and you could tell it was going to be a pivotal point in his life. But the music you heard—do-do-do-do-do-do-do—didn’t make you feel so good. It created such a good contrast. I just wanted to do something that felt like that.”

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