
He left his native New Orleans in 1996 when he was 19 to bounce from couch to couch and basement to basement, trying to not only rap but to become the sort of rap messiah he believed in. From the earliest demos we’ve heard, Jay Electronica was insistent that he had been anointed for greatness, that the coincidences and strokes of luck that would soon come were the hand of God guiding him - which is what made it so curious when all that ambition seemed, for the near decade when he was nearly invisible, to dissolve into thin air.īy all accounts - “accounts” because most of Jay’s life story has been pieced together through anecdotes told by those who’ve encountered him - this is how Jay’s life really went until he was at least 30 years old: a web of crushing misfortunes and quasi-divine interventions, high hopes and missed deadlines. He made the stick figures from old rap songs into aging gods with limps and bad teeth, and then he imagined them as his peers.
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The New York of Jay’s imagination is something like that, a mythical rap land where the Five Percenters will teach you how to count bars and you can stumble across Just Blaze’s iChat address and hound him to make you a star (the latter really happened and the former might have, too he registered with the Nation of Islam some time around the turn of the century). He snatches up a few belongings, kisses his little sister, and promises to come back one day. He tells his mother he’s had enough - he’s moving to New York to pursue rapping.
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Jay’s mind lurches from his friend’s East Coast accent (they called him “Connecticut Minnie”) to the crack charges hanging over his older cousin’s head. Lump in my throat, I just lost my best friend.” “I looked down at the ground: ‘I don’t know where he’s at, ma’am’ That’s when Minnie’s mother walks out into the yard and asks where her son is. The four young men are stunned Freddy faints. Here, Jay starts panting like Brian, terrified and out of breath, and explains in Brian’s voice that their mutual friend Minnie had been killed in the Calliope housing projects. When Brian came flying up the block like Batman.” With Freddie and Black Teddy, just playing a crap game


The enigmatic New Orleans rapper’s origin story, as told in a little late-2000s sketch called “ Departure,” takes place in the aftermath of a friend’s murder. When he first emerged from the depths of the internet, Jay Electronica seemed to be a project about ambition. From the earliest demos we’ve heard, Jay Electronica was insistent that he had been anointed for greatness - which is what made it so curious when all that ambition seemed, for the near decade when he was nearly invisible, to dissolve into thin air.
