Jay Electronica f/ Che Grand: "Hagler"

Supreme Clientele (2000) is kind of like the Bible: it’s got something to do with everything. You know on Ghostface’s “Saturday Nite” where you think the beat at first is some good ol’ hip-hop, carried off like a comforting cliché, but then you really pay attention and notice how Carlos Broady’s sample flip feels like it’s tumbling, trying to conform itself to Ghost’s unhinged flow, and as soon as the realization sets in that the whole track is bonkers, poof, it’s out? Well, in similar sly fashion Denaun Porter is blowing my mind with this “Hagler” beat. Porter’s from Detroit and on first listen “Hagler” seems just a standard-bearer of that new Detroit vibe: chill and spartan with each sloppy snare hit speaking Dilla’s name. But then you listen listen and realize how sickly used the vocal chop is; its cries stutter in the high range before descending, somehow morphing into synth crashes that send static sparking then falling off to make way for those cries, once again. This cycles for well under three minutes, quickly achieving ineffability and permitting two killer verses to drop as cold/hot naturally as sweat off icicles.

Perpetually on-the-rise Jay Electronica doesn’t quite top the post-Nas rap savior antics of his Just Blaze-backed “Exhibit A (Tranformations),” but he does wind his turn down into a clutch conclusion, “I never lost yet, but if I did it would be sorely / Therefore, I implore thee / Never come before the / Champion of men, the beginning and the end.” It’s interesting to see how, no matter if it’s Blaze or Porter, whoever produces for Jay Electronica ends up producing something that sounds on his translucent plane, Electronica being a producer himself (and the only cat that delivered something fresh on Nas’ Untitled [2008] with the drumless piano ripples of “Queens Get the Money”). This kind of plane is the perfect stage for Che Grand, deliverer of pure heat on CMG’s Fantasy Cover of Ghostface’s “Be Easy” back in ’06, to here deliver a verse so effortlessly yet absolutely fly that if I started quoting it I wouldn’t be able to stop. But let’s just say that Che’s got “guts running through [his] veins”, that both he and Jay E. have a gift for virile vernacular and deadly enunciation, that Denaun Porter is a scientist, and that “Hagler” is a contender for champion in whatever ring you throw at it.

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