Jay Electronica: New New Things (Ebony July 30, 2008)
Rock the Bells, the hip-hop summer tour, includes nostalgia (De La Soul, Tribe Called Quest reunion), politics (dead prez, Immortal Technique) and has Nas as its headliner (whose No. 1 debut on the charts supplanted L'il Wayne while selling 1/10th the amount of records as the ubiquitous Weezy). But the festival is nothing if not a national coming out for one of music's best kept secrets, Jay Electronica. The New Orleans native is a master m.c. who's been building his debut album in Detroit basements for the past couple of years. Gossip sites have outed him as Badu's latest baby daddy, but hip-hop heads who work and play on the internets have been giving him hugs since last fall, when he released five or six dozen genius bars over a loop from the score to Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (it appears on his myspace page as "The Pledge" without the 4 minute intro. by Just Blaze and Badu). After recovering from a shaky first big live show with Mos Def this spring at Nokia Theatre in New York, the god mc who samples the History Channel and renders Tesla comprehensible, is performing all new songs in his high school marching band uniform complete with spats (he played the French Horn) in a city near you. Check him out. He's a more muscular Nas, a smarter 50 Cent, the best mc since Hov, or all of the above. You decide.
Detroit garage is safe in the able, soulful hands of the great Jack White, even if he and fellow raconteur Brendan Benson did defect to Memphis, but if you want to dig deeper, you’ve go to check out The Dirtbombs one of punk’s best live bands evah. Lead singer and band founder Mick Collins could probably get in your home wearing a uniform from the cable company but onstage he explodes, morphing into a hard-working rock Ogun. The Dirtbombs always include classics from their full-length debut 1998’s Horndogs but come just as hard with new stuff from this year’s We Have You Surrounded. There’s nothing like seeing them live, so if you’re in shape and lucky, do so.
My sistas always wanna punch me in the face when I argue Foxy and Kim were as nice with the lyrics as Ms. Hill. But I’m tired of arguing over the 90s. And who says female mcs are history. Queens native Nicki Minaj stuffs her DDs in a bright pink bikini top and cops her best L’il Kim squat then proceeds to get super bossy on her banger Playtime is Over. I love a girl who does her own writing and like Ms. Hill, Nicki Minaj not only handles her own rhymes but has been known to lend her boys a few to hold. Like most girls with a television, Nicki believes sex sells, but it’s her skills that’ll earn your respect.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s “Spirits Up Above“ is covered with daring bravado by jazz vocalist Jose James. His equally fearless approach to Coltrane’s "Equinox" is straight up dazzling. Pieces of his brilliant new work are available on his myspace and will soon be available on an album he’s releasing later this year on legendary London based DJ Gilles Peterson’s new label, Brownswood. His cover of Freestyle Fellowship’s “Park Bench People” made me mist a little---maybe I hadn’t appreciated them like I should’ve in the early nineties. James treats them with the same respect as jazz giants. The Brooklyn-based vocalist and composer James is firmly rooted in classic jazz but goes where he wants. With his bellowing bassy alto and his perfect pitch he’s making his musical ancestral forefathers Eddie Jefferson and King Pleasure proud.
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