9 hours before my alarm, I’m about to go to sleep and actually get a good night’s sleep for once but I got a notification on my phone from a new app I downloaded called [Fresh] by a dude on Reddit. The app notifies users when new songs reach a number of upvotes on the hip hop subreddit. This notification was for a song called Letter to Falon by Jay Electronica. Jay Electronica is a rap enigma, he disappears for long periods of time but when he does drop music its worth listening to. He first came to popularity after dropping Act 1: Eternal Sunshine (The Pledge) in 2007. That was 10 years ago, Jay Elec has now been in and out of the limelight for an entire decade. A number of tracks have come out over the years a few at a time, Exhibit C is a personal favorite. In 2010 Jay Z announced Jay Electronica had signed to his label and the rumors of a debut album, Act II, began. Jay Electronica fans have been jerked around mercilessly for years, maybe this new song is just the beginning before he finally drops the album, maybe this is another track to bide us over for a few years.
The song starts off with a piano, some very ethereal noises and what sounds like a moan. Then comes in the drums and Jay begins the chorus. After the hook and some “yeahhhh”s the first verse begins, with a Star Wars reference no less. Jay accomplishes what he is known for with impressive flow and lyricism, there is also a call and response quality to the verses in this song. Most of the lyrics seem to center around overcoming hardship in the face of adversity, it almost sounds like a sports pump up song with a little Gospel thrown in. This song unfortunately won’t go off at the pregame like some new Lil Uzi Vert but its a great headphones track.
I’m not sure what the song title means, I thought at first it could be a reference to Jimmy Falon, however after searching on the internet I was unable to come up with a link between the two. According to Jay’s twitter he dropped the song as a “gift” to Kevin Durant for his performance in the NBA finals, as seen below.
The song is only available on Tidal, which makes sense because Jay Electronica is on Jay Z’s label, which has an exclusive deal with Tidal in order to compete with Apple Music and Spotify (possibly Amazon Music in the next few years too). Maybe this is indicitive of more new music coming soon, according to this blog post he is scheduled to release new music with MF DOOM via the Adult Swim singles program. Then again, maybe he’s just releasing this track for KD and the other track to get paid by Adult Swim so he doesn’t have to release any more music for a few years. Until then:
Stop Tweaking 