Jay Electronica - Exhibit C
Lately, this song has been lifting up my spirits. I’ve been trying to reconcile the string of every negative thing that’s happened in the past two years with the silver lining of it all. Recently I have been trying to build up hope, and remain hopeful, about what I’m working on and what’s next. Sometimes it’s not that easy.
When Jay raps about being without “a single slice of pizza” to his name, I can identify with his figurative and literal hunger. He further explains his situation of being down, homeless, fighting, but still, exclaiming his own pride, and confessing to having been spoke to by an angel, and with that, he offers his own silver lining in comparison to his negative past. He reconciles his current life style with what he wants next when his peers pose him with the prose of “You either build or you destroy.”
From there, Jay does both. He builds himself up by destroying the track, paraphrasing his peers by exclaiming “it’s quite amazing that rhyme like how you do and that you shine like you do like you grew up in a shrine in Peru.” Jay sincerely loves hip hop, and loves being honest, and it just feels good to hear it. I’m glad he’s spitting “that ‘he could pass a polygraph.’ that ‘Reverend Run rocking Adidas out on Hollis Ave.’”, because no one else is.
The grimy tales of crime, and the incessant naming of projects, streets, and neighborhoods, all add to authenticity. It’s also important to note that he doesn’t indicate himself in the crime. He acknowledges the fact that these things do happen, and even though he doesn’t participate, it’s a way of life he has seen, a way of life he doesn’t justify, but understands. He knows deep down that these actions are not progressive, and it is his want for progress that defines his reconciliation of the two (progressive lifestyle or the retroactive lifestyle), to further argue the point of progress. The maps and tales of his life strengthen that very argument into his own testament. Exhibit C indeed (Exhibit A being the second, Act I as the first).
He doesn’t consider his following as fans, but as family. His humbleness doesn’t go unnoticed. Finally, there is a rapper that’s being played on Hot 97 that isn’t talking down to us, but is talking with us, literally on Twitter/BBM/AIM.
It’s enlightening enough for me, an athiest, to want to change my Facebook religion to “Jay Elec-Hanukkah”. Well, either that or Team CoCo.
