Maybe This Album Will Come Out

Jay Electronica Shares Album Tracklist | Pitchfork

The tracklist for Jay Electronica's album has been posted, what that means, who knows exactly? It's always odd to me that these are even released. Ostensibly, this is to pique interest in the album, although it seems like it only makes it easier to search for the individual tracks and download them. I assume these releases are aimed at critics/bloggers as much, if not more so, than the fans. In this case it seems like The Illuminati's Favorite Rapper is letting everyone know that: a) He's going to have some marketable tracks with Kanye and Puff, and b) He's letting him do some "weird" shit too, with Erykah Badu and the like.

Oddly, there's a feature with Ronald Reagan, which would lead me to believe that they used a sample of his voice and thought it would be clever to list it this way. Kanye did the same thing with "Otis" last year, although with all the sampling he does, that seemed odd too. I couldn't find any proof that was due to a legal issue with the Redding estate, but Ye never made a statement about this being out of respect or his "genius shared vision" or such. Considering he sampled three different James Brown songs on "Gotta Have It", but didn't list JB as a feature, you would think something's up. Although that might be because, as noted fingerbanging expert Too $hort once quipped about the Godfather of Soul, "they used it all up and didn't pay the man." But I digress.

Although "Dear Moleskine" is missing, the "official" release of that track has a huge gap where another guest verse would likely go, and I suspect that could be one of those "iTunes exclusives". (Maybe somebody else was the guest verse, and legal wrangling or other industry nonsense got in the way.) Although, who cares anymore if an album is missing a track, if you can just download the song anyway? (I'm sure Just Blaze just wants that track to be on somebody's album, considering his financial difficulties, as well as his video game addiction as evidenced in the "Fade to Black" documentary.) Fair enough. Hopefully the album sees the light of day, or at least the internet.

Here's one possible route they could go, with a lifted Kendirck Lamar verse, and a "feature" from Malcolm X: