He demanded the removal of the missiles already there and the destruction of the sites.
The aim of this "quarantine," as he called it, was to prevent the Soviets from bringing in more military supplies. He met in secret with his advisors for several days to discuss the problem.Īfter many long and difficult meetings, Kennedy decided to place a naval blockade, or a ring of ships, around Cuba. President Kennedy did not want the Soviet Union and Cuba to know that he had discovered the missiles. In October 1962, an American U-2 spy plane secretly photographed nuclear missile sites being built by the Soviet Union on the island of Cuba. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museumįor thirteen days in October 1962 the world waited-seemingly on the brink of nuclear war-and hoped for a peaceful resolution to the Cuban Missile Crisis. It exists nonetheless, and that’s a righteous step forward. That it doesn’t have forceful songs like “Exhibit C,” “Dear Moleskine,” or “The Ghost of Christopher Wallace” could draw naysayers, even if it picks up where Jay Elec left off. “I can’t stop my mind from racing.” Ultimately, A Written Testimony is an accomplished album with decent rewind factor, but it feels somewhat hampered by the seismic impact of the rapper's work a decade ago. “Sometimes a Xanny bar can’t help you fight back the anxiety,” he divulges. On “Soulja Slim,” he appears to take a subtle jab at his ex-girlfriend, banking heiress Kate Rothschild, whom he dated from 2012 to 2014 (“I came to bang with the scholars and I bet you a Rothschild I’ll get a bang for my dollar.”) On album closer “A.P.I.D.T.A.,” which was recorded the day basketball legend Kobe Bryant died, Electronica delves into the concerns keeping him up at night. tap water fake news and America’s political tyranny. When he’s alone, on the quick yet impressive “Fruits of the Spirit,” Jay Elec runs through several topics in under two minutes: heart chakras Flint, Mich. Jay-Z and Jay Elec have nice synergy, but this is the latter’s opening salvo, and he sounds like the second fiddle in spots. They starred on each other’s work, and in some cases, the lead rapper let the co-star command whole songs by himself. On “Flux Capacitor,” he swats those who rebuke his partnership with the National Football League: “Why would I sell out, I’m already rich, don’t make no sense/Got more money than Goodell, a whole NFL bench/Did it one-handed like Odell, handcuffed to a jail.” With an album’s worth of back and forth rhymes, Testimony recalls Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx and Ghostface Killah’s Ironman as solo records in name alone. On “Ghost of Soulja Slim,” Jay-Z comes off like a Bed-Stuy hustler with one foot in the boardroom and the other on Marcy Avenue. He sounds motivated and streetwise here, like the old Jay-Z, outweighing the euphoria of hearing Elec spit new rhymes on a new album. Not that he isn’t still capable of scene-stealing, but Jay-Z hasn’t rapped this hard since the early 2000s when he was the undisputed King of Hip-Hop. Jay-Z gives Jay Electronica plenty of help on A Written Testimony, appearing on eight tracks, often outshining the protagonist’s noteworthy performance.
Elec raps: “Hov hit me up like, ‘What, you scared of heights?’ Know your sister tired of workin’, gotta do her something nice … When I look inside the mirror all I see is flaws … In the wee hours of night, tryna squeeze out bars/Bismillah, just so y'all could pick me apart?”
On “The Blinding,” he mentions how his label boss also pushed him to make a move - much like Nas and Diddy tried to do all those years ago. Elec’s flightiness has long surfaced in his music - “Nas hit me up on the phone said, ‘What you waitin’ on,’” he once quipped on “Exhibit C” - and it arises sporadically on Testimony. “Sometimes I was held down by the gravity of my sin/Sometimes, like Santiago, at crucial points in my novel, my only logical option was to transform into the wind.” The translation, it seems, is that Jay suffered from bouts of writer’s block he knew how many people were waiting for his album and the pressure became too immense.
And now the obvious question: What took Jay Elec so long to record and release the LP? “Sometimes I was held down by the gravity of my pen,” he proclaims on “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” a slow-churning track that name-checks Paulo Coelho’s book The Alchemist.
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