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Alright, so this verse first appeared on “Attack of the Clones,” but I like this song way better, and it reminds me of the time these loosies would either be played on Shade 45 or they would somehow find their way onto the ‘net. And even with a “recycled” verse, he managed to stand toe-to-toe with Mighty Mos, and that’s no small task for the Jay Man.

This is the intro to one of his first mixtapes, and it’s one of my favorite displays of MCing ever. It’s almost like there’s some kinda higher power feeding him these lines and he goes into a booth and loses consciousness as he’s reciting these raps. How are you supposed to keep calm when you hear someone spit, “My rhymes like sperm cells thoughts for tales/ Reproduce like sperm whales, sharks, and snails/Hit your gray matter then they excrete the data/ And gestate for nine months above the bladder”?

What a time.

His Style Wars tape from around 2007 stays in rotation on this side, and the intro has aged like fine wine. Rappers need to sample movies more often, it makes for good theater and adds a cinematic element. Jay Elect was great at creating a world and understood how to craft a song from jump. He really did feel like he was Neo lifting the wool from our eyes and showing us The Matrix.

I’m not one of those people that feels like rap is a horrible place, but any genre could use an act that comes along and blows everyone away, even its just for a short period of time. This is the type of stuff they make documentaries and write books about. Elect still manages to feel like a mystery all these years later, and there’s something special about that.

I can’t front and act like Jay Elect didn’t put me onto one of Christopher Nolan’s best films in The Prestige. Sometimes you gotta ask yourself: Are you watching closely?

Absolute chills whenever I listen to this right here. I would like to highlight the first comment you see under the video below:

“I had on a jay elect shirt at school. my friends asked [me] who jay electronica? i said “a painter wit a felt pen, who drew ali”

Same.

Where were you when you first heard, “From Baton Rouge to Jerusalem, rap crews we bruisin’ ’em/ Crooked mouth, flat-footed, cops, man, we losin’ them”? I don’t remember where I was either, but I wish I did, because I wanna hear this song for the first time again. He dropped this around 2010 right before he dropped another song on this list, “The Announcement,” which he released to announce his signing to Roc Nation, and featured John F. Kennedy.

This is a perfect rap song. No notes, besides that the slow, monotone flow is underrated. Shout out to rappers like Roc Marciano, Boldy James, Larry June and the late, great Ka for making sure it doesn’t go anywhere.

This is a lyrical masterclass over a J Dilla beat and is probably my favorite Jay verses behind his work on “Exhibit A”. I mean, he starts the song off by rapping, “Jay electrolysis, probin’ the globe like a geologist/ Puttin’ all of you pussies on display like gynecologists” and namedrops deities from the Aztec empire. I’m sorry, you can call me a purist, call me an old man, but this is what rap is all about at the end of the day.

He starts this track off with crazy lines like, “I never got shook up by talks of Illuminati/ I’m from where n—as talk that talk then walk around the streets all day carrying heat like the human body/ Stress — we mastered that Death — we laugh at that/ You n—as sweeter than the cognac.” And then his signal fades towards the end of the last verse because he’s going so crazy the mothership had to disrupt his transmission. I kinda wish he kept that fading signal effect on his music the way he’s keep the applause and the cheers.

I be wanting to run through a wall after hearing that Kennedy speech. “Not because they are easy! But because they are hard!” And then you couple that with the beat and extraterrestrial raps talking about “the stars aligning like cars at Grand Central Station.” There are few things better in this world than when you know you’re witnessing greatness in real time.

If you’re into conspiracies, then this track is for you; it’s like reading one of those books you could cop on the street in Harlem.

He said:

“Listen, the two faced king from Britain and Rome/ Had a baby in the bush on the Grassy Knoll/ Where they peeled back the orange head peel of a gnome/ He said he emcee, I know you like killin’ them/ You terrorized the skies for 25 millenniums/ Now you settin’ fire to land/ You the lion, you the savior, the messiah, the lamb/ You need backup he movin’ on the youth at dawn/ Call Badu and get Tyrone on the megaphone/ Tell ’em I sent you and your codename is Megatron/ If trouble come use your brain like a telephone.”

And, of course, the signal fades because he’s dropping so many jewels, the powers that be said, “Enough’s enough.”

Some consider this one track, while some consider it to be a short mixtape or EP, but I’ve always enjoyed listening to this version. This guy came in the game with a foreword by Erykah Badu and Just Blaze talking about his genius and aura, then rapped over a loop from the score of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — and then you immediately understand why someone you had never heard about had a foreword by Erykah Badu and Just Blaze.

It really be upsetting me and my homeboys that he and Just Blaze were never able to drop a full-length project together. These guys made magic. Remember when Post Malone said that rap music isn’t vulnerable? I hope someone played this song for him and then maybe some peak DMX and 2Pac. “Dear Moleskine” is one of those tracks you throw on late night when it’s just you and your thoughts. It always gets me when he opens up the song by rapping:

“Have you ever ever ever been depressed so bad, it was a struggle every day not to regret your past?/ Feeling cursed like you never ever get your swag/ And you was speeding down the highway when your threshold passed/ When you cried all your tears out/ And one page of your diary can tell you what your year ’bout/ That’s a lonely place.”

Talk about vulnerability.

This was the first Jay Elect song that I came across and it remains my favorite. The beat, the Willy Wonka sample, starting his verse off with a line from Jay-Z‘s “Dead Presidents” song, the bars? Imagine coming across an unknown rapper and this is the first thing you heard from them. My brain melted hearing this alien rap so effortlessly. Not a bar was wasted. I thought I was listening to the greatest rapper to ever live, and this record made me want to spread the Gospel of Jay Electronica. This is how the apostles must’ve felt when they first heard the Good Word from out of Jesus’ mouth.

This is the one that shook up the world, and I had the pleasure of watching him perform this song multiple times as he was coming up. Both times were memorable, too — I saw him at the Knitting Factory in Brooklyn for a Phife Dawg benefit concert, and then again at a Yasiin Bey show on Martin Luther King Day when Elect was piping hot. I talked to Jay outside of the Knitting Factory and tried to interview him for an outlet I was interning for at the time. He gave me his number and BBM, but I was sent on a wild goose chase and never got that interview. Anyways, I can’t wait until we get a new rookie to drop something as game-shifting as “Exhibit C”.

You just had to be there.