Make My Dream Come True

On Jai Paul's debut-as-return; real heads only

“whats goin on my names jai im a artist/producer jst startin out in the game let me kno if u feel it…thanks 2every1 whos been backin me I rly appreciate it peace jai”.

If you were told in April of 2013 that, in ten years’ time, Jai Paul would be listed in large font on Coachella’s final day, you likely would not have batted an eye. Paul’s album had just been released to the world, and while the event was rife with uncertainties – is it “Jai Paul” or “Bait Ones?”¹; was this a leak, an official release, or a Jai Paul himself bucking his label?; who is this guy, anyway? – the music itself was undeniable. The release, over its scattershot 16 songs, sketches, and interludes, served both as a creative revelation and an artistic proof-of-concept. If Paul’s debut singles, “Jasmine” and “BTSTU,” awed the music world with their fractal precision and glimmering beauty, the record saw him follow his creative impulses down every rabbit hole he could find. The ephemeral, elusive Rayners Lane artist had evolved from an unknown, exhilarating prospect to a musician building a body of work just as stunning as its first entries. Paul’s music sounded, more like anything else, like the future; naturally, the future was his for the taking.

It’s everything that happened, or didn’t happen, since which makes Jai Paul’s upcoming debut live performance at Coachella so improbable. The record, we learned in a Tweet for which Paul created a Twitter account, was a leak, not an official release. “Please don’t buy,” Paul pleaded. “Statement to follow later.”

In the more than six years it took for the statement to in fact follow, Paul receded into near-total absence from the public eye. In his absence, the Internet transformed him into mystery and meme alike, both a music world in-joke and a perfectly unknowable, entirely singular lost talent. Being an online music fan in the mid-2010s meant investigating Jai Paul’s whereabouts with the same sort of fervent intensity with which music fans once sought to pierce (the other astronomically visionary, reclusive Londoner) Burial’s anonymity. Scraps of information turned into headlining news, whether releases from Paul’s brilliantly talented brother, A.K., news of the founding of the “Paul Institute,” or, most hilariously, a photograph of Jai Paul in a hard-hat and neon construction vest, breaking ground on what was to become the Paul Institute’s home. The first picture in three years of the man responsible for the most ambitious record of the decade was not of him in a studio, but of him stanced alongside three businessmen and his brother ready to build one.

There is a risk, in an era so foundationally obsessed with identity and its reproduction, of fetishizing and elevating anonymity as a sort of counterbalance. Mystery attracts precisely because we are afforded so little of it: there seems to be nothing that through the Internet we cannot know or have. Mysteries, and particularly mysterious artists, run the risk of being captured and rendered toothless by a pathological desire to be explained or, in the alternative, by being rendered so blank a canvas for speculation that the magic underlying the mystery is forgotten, overrun, or memed into obsolescence. Jai Paul’s music, despite the rampant mythologizing to which he and it was subjected,² found a way to survive on its own terms. This fact, in and of itself, is a triumph. With every reminder of Paul, whether through his fingerprints on Paul Institute releases or the increasingly bland and sterile imitations of his style proliferating across pop music, one would return to his work and remember why they still cared to uncover and resuscitate his voice. 2017’s “Mystery,” a lush, glimmering track by Paul’s prodigy, Fabiana Palladino, was a smoke signal. “You’re a mystery, but somehow I belong to you,” sings Palladino over production with the bones of an 80s ballad as filtered through the muted, antigravitational sound of Discovery One. Behind her, Paul’s electric guitar climbs to the fore of the mix. His backing vocals, his first vocal recording in four years, step forward in a smoky lounge. He asks: “why don’t you call me now?”

 Jai Paul’s music endured in no small part due to the nature of its leaking. The leak possesses a certain unevenness and unpredictability directly resulting by its unofficial nature. The track selections have a randomness that can make Paul’s musical world feel all-encompassing; its sequencing, while intuitive and eminently logical on an emotional level, also bears the shape-shifting feel of a leak compiled and ordered by someone other than the artist. Take the leak’s opening. The record begins in medias res with “Jewel,” a sub-thirty-second, sample-heavy breakbeat. Having thus begun, it flips into the stunning “Str8 Outta Mumbai,” the hyper-charged anthem that doubles as the leak’s title sequence. Unlike “Jewel,” “Str8 Outta Mumbai” appears fully formed – its layers eminently considered, its samples perfectly placed, its melody realized.³ As “Mumbai” triumphantly ends, “Zion Wolf”s undulating synths lap in. A billowing track equal parts mission statement and premonition, “Zion Wolf” exemplifies perhaps more than any other track the effusive, unpolished heart throughout the leak.

The leak oscillates between bombastic triumph and unadulterated yearning – a sense of longing and mystery so powerful that it’s unclear whether Paul’s vocals sound mixed underneath most songs as a byproduct of incomplete editing or as an intentional distancing and self-burial. Paul’s music is often appropriately described as galactic, but one of its most enduringly mysterious qualities is also the way in which his songs feel subaquatic. His voice is pearl-like even as it lies beneath waves of synths, drums, guitars, and samples; the moments where he brings himself to the fore and strips back the track around him are those where, more so than anywhere else, his myth is sustained.

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“I’m back and I want what is mine”

In a silence-breaking statement released in June of 2019, 6 years after the leak and his resultant self-imposed exile, Jai Paul described the pain he felt at losing control of his unfinished work even as it was celebrated and cherished by the fans who heard it. He wrote:

“I understand that it might have seemed like a positive thing to a lot of people - the music they had been waiting to hear was finally out there - but for me, it was very difficult to deal with. As things unfolded I went through a number of phases, but the immediate, overriding feeling was one of complete shock. I felt numb, I couldn’t take it all in at first. I felt pretty alone with everything, like no-one else seemed to view the situation in the same way I did: as a catastrophe. There was a lot going through my mind, but the hardest thing to grasp was that I’d been denied the opportunity to finish my work and share it in its best possible form. I believe it’s important for artists as creators to have some control over the way in which their work is presented, at a time that they consider it complete and ready.”

[…]

“ I suppose the music was special to me in a way, stuff that I began writing as a teenager in my room just for fun, eventually signing my record deal with it at 21, and hoping that I could put it towards a debut album with XL. I guess having that dream torn up in front of me hit me pretty hard.”

In the statement, which flits between bouts of extreme vulnerability and business-like detachment, Paul describes how both the theft of his creative work and the rampant speculation that followed sent him down a path of trauma, grief, and immense pain. The statement also cast Paul’s mystery in a new light, his absence not as a cheap, self-cultivated mythologizing but as a response to heartbreak and betrayal. Jai Paul had been watching fans on the Internet consume his stolen work for 6 years;⁴ it’s hard to imagine how he felt being celebrated as a genius for work that, for all intents and purposes, was nowhere near where he had wanted it to be.

It’s difficult to cherish art that has been visibly taken from an artist in any case, but all the more so when the horizons of a work’s vision are as broad and uncharted as the leak’s. The leak is built of songs as potent as any I’ve heard to restructure the terrain of pop music – to expand what is possible, to beget a new frontier of creativity. There is a guilt, then, in having so closely identified with a work that was not only incomplete but a source of tremendous pain for its creator. But, as Paul himself notes, there is a finality in how his music was leaked that, in retrospect, appears nearly predestined. It’s undeniable that the experience of listening to such revolutionary music was in a way enhanced by the near-total mystery of the artist behind it. Passing around .zip files like contraband felt in a way radical, especially as legalized streaming came to monopolize the music world; as all work and effort was removed from the act of listening to music, Paul’s leaked record felt profoundly rewarding in part due to the leaps and bounds one had to take to acquire and then share it. A stolen album, perversely, became music as communion. Loving the music could not be separated from its status as illicit, even if now it’s clear that to listen to the leak was to effectuate a certain and precise betrayal to Jai Paul himself.

It's the fact that Jai Paul feels ready to present his music to live audiences, then, that is so exhilarating about his upcoming Coachella performance. Longtime aficionados know far better than to expect the performance will go off without a hitch – or, for that matter, will go on at all – but there is a beauty in knowing that ten years removed from the theft of his first work, Paul will still be afforded the opportunity to claim his throne on his own terms. It may be the case that the pop music landscape he reenters will no longer bear the weight of his creative might. Identity occupies an unavoidable centrality in music marketing. The album has given way to the playlist; “vibes,” which might be cheaply attributed to Paul’s more hypnotizing melodies, threaten to flatten any one song into a unit of infinitely disposable digital currency. Paul’s sonic influence has seen his sound proliferate as it is neutered. The music world is significantly more commodified than it was even ten years ago, hostile to an artist like Paul’s creativity, reserve, and meticulous deliberation.

Still, there are signs that Jai Paul’s singular vision may be able to wrench pop music from its banal, cynical, infinitely replicable arc. As the online art world continues to spin its wheels on the horizons of AI-generated “art,” launching into debates about the human soul that largely miss the way in which even “human-made” media has fallen into a certain algorithmic logic, I find myself revisiting a largely forgotten project of Paul’s. Buried amidst the fanfare of Paul’s return to the public eye in 2019 was the announcement of a site, hosted by the Bronze artificial intelligence engine, which combined AI machine learning and a suite of Jai Paul’s recorded stems to create an infinite series of endless remixes to his standout single, “Jasmine.” Rather than adopting a defeatist, “infinite scroll” aesthetic, the Jasmine engine identifies and builds upon two of the most captivating aspects of Paul’s music – its sense of constant evolution and its prospect to become a world unto itself. Refreshing Bronze Jasmine means hearing an unspeakably beautiful love song for the first time ad infinitum – guitars brought to the foreground, intros riffed out for tens of minutes, and, if you’re lucky enough, a heart-aching vocal coda from Paul not included in the original studio version. Even as the prospects for music’s future bode grim, Paul reminds us how technology can be used not to flatten experiences but to preserve and replicate the ephemeral – to leave the page is to say farewell to an iteration of “Jasmine” forever.

More than anything else, then, Jai Paul’s upcoming live debut seems a promise that the generation’s most exciting visionary intends to recommit to experimenting with the tools of modern music-making that he seems to have been born to utilize. Our cheap culture is totalizing, but there is hope yet that Jai Paul can re-take control.

Listen to Jasmine - Bronze here.

1. My leak was called “Jai Paul,” and that’s how I’ll refer to it. So, too, will this leak’s track listing and titling remain canonical in my eyes.

2. The most egregious example, while also something of a public service, being the now-lost Jai Paul megathread on Kanye To The.

3. It’s worth noting that when Paul officially “released” the leak to streaming services, “Str8 Outta Mumbai” was the only song that did not bear the caveat “unfinished.”

4. Paul’s lurking was made obvious when, upon entering his batshit, space-world-like website, one could find Tweets and forum posts made about him over the years. My Tweets, from a long-deleted account, were among them.