Jay Elect’s French Does Not Connect

The lengths I will go to hear some new Jay Electronica. Yesterday our hero, working with Jeymes Samuel‘s new group The Bullitts, released a nine and a half minute long short (short?) film to introduce their song “Run and Hide” (or more properly, “Fuir et Se Cacher”). This is, I suppose, the sort of integration of art and hip-hop that we seek out at RESPECT., but I’m feeling more than a little flabbergasted.

Samuel, in addition to working on the music, provided the direction for the video. We see actress Elisa Lasowski walking around Paris, looking melancholy. At minute five, we finally get our first earful of Jay Elect, and it lasts 35 seconds. Sigh.

I cannot stress enough, we like ambitious, high-concept music videos. But it’s about the music first, the service of an abstract concept second. Considering Samuel is still introducing the Bullitts to the world, he shouldn’t be making people work so hard to get a listen. There’s simply too much empty space in this video, too much of a gap between the film and the music itself. Given that the music these guys are making is new, exciting, and pretty much speaks for itself, cloaking it in the strangeness of the short film seems like a strange decision.

And yes, there’s not enough Jay Electronica. But that’s the case with the entire world, one could argue.