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No, I have no interest in knowing who Jai Paul is. I just thought it’d be fun to throw a ‘who is John Galt’ reference in there just to ensure I shed as many readers as possible before paragraph two.
Well that was a straight up lie. I’m obsessed with Jai Paul. The fact he’s officially released 2 singles in 6 years of being signed to a record label drives me crazy. I want more music. But then I thought of that (pretty terrible) Ayn Rand title // joke and I realised Jai Paul is basically John Galt. And I realised, he needs to stay that way. Enigmatic. No public presence. Perhaps, even, no new music. Ever.
Really?
Well, a little background for the uninitiated. Jai Paul is the name of a musician who got signed to the soothsayers of all big things, XL Recordings, off the back of one demo, BTSTU. This happened in 2010. Six years ago. BTSTU got released in Spring 2011 as a single. Another single, Jasmine, was released the following year, again in Spring. And then, in the Spring of 2013, a wedge of demos were hoisted onto a Bandcamp page, priced at £7, and rapidly gorged upon by the needy masses (myself included). You see, we were desperate for more, irrespective of it this was a leak or not. Turns out, according to Jai Paul’s one and only ever Tweet, it was. We all felt a little bad. But then we carried on listening to some of those demos and sat with wonder at how incredible they were. Str8 Outta Mumbai, amazing. A cover of that Jennifer Page song everyone sang while at school (Crush), amazing. Imagine what a real, finished album by Jai Paul could sound like?
Notice how all the events in the previous paragraph took place in Spring? And notice how the last event took place in 2013, three years ago? Well, much has changed since then. The world has changed in leaps and bounds. I think we believe the internet has given people an increasingly powerful voice, for good and for bad. I mean, we’re on the verge of naming a polar exploring ship Boaty McBoatface. Plus, Spring has just sprung again. Things with Jai Paul seem to happen in this time of year. And so just as releasing a Groundhog to see if he sees his own shadow has become a strange ritual, a bunch of people aimlessly wander around the internet trying to sniff out Jai Paul activity each Spring. We shout into the endless void of the internet in the hope it’ll stir something out of him. We are the groundhog handlers trying to drag the Jai Paul groundhog out of his little goundhog cage for our own shortsighted entertainment.
But it’s not the same as with other artists. Frank Ocean said he’d drop his new album in July 2015, and here we are in March 2016, still waiting. But we know he’ll be good for it. We know it’ll be worth the wait. We know he’s still alive, and who he is. And this Frank Ocean wait has become part of the cultural zeitgeist. Memes litter the internet every day as we jestingly post pictures of Frank out shopping when he should be at home, WORKING ON THAT DAMN SECOND ALBUM FRANK! COME ON MAN!
With Jai Paul, we know nothing, about anything, and maybe that’s why he should stay away. We don’t really have a clue who he is. He’s not something or someone to get eaten up and swallowed by the news cycle. A perfect example of this is Kanye West’s Twitter. There was a time when I was a Kanye fan. He was a little bit of a new thing. A bit weird, and made some pretty great music. He tweeted rarely, and it helped to make him more deceptive and unknown, likely for the better. Now that he can’t stop posting, we’ve come to realise that maybe we liked how it was before. EG, how to go from enigmatic to banal AF:
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/707704561407041537
Some like to refer to Jai Paul as an alien who visited us for a while, who’s gone back to his home planet. I’m pretty sure he’s in London somewhere, doing something weird and amazing, like this ‘Foundation’ he’s set up with his brother recently suggests. It gives no information what it is, and just asks you to sign up with your phone number. He could be trying to sell us PPI Protection, but I’d be down for that because the hold jingles would be out of this world.
So are we going to get anything new from Jai Paul this Spring? Probably not. I’m at that stage now where I’m happy for it to never happen, which sounds weird and self-defeating, I know. But how can he beat BTSTU and Jasmine? How can he beat those leaked demos? This level of myth and legend surrounding his music and persona makes it nigh on impossible for him to really succeed in a conventional way, like appearing on a Graham Norton chat show making ‘banter’ with some other famous people.
And him being this weird deity, with his one-tweet-Twitter, and his insane set-in-space collage of Lizo Mzimba, bears and Gianfranco Zola…. I’d rather never hear from him again, and put him on this untouchable pedestal rather than read what he had for lunch. Besides, his brother seems to make a pretty mean jam anway.
Horses Playing Harps 