THE STORY BEHIND THE LEAK OF A MYTHOLOGIZED RAP ALBUM
When one of hip-hopâs most mythical albums was finally unearthed, the artist behind it, Jay Electronica, praised Allah for its unforeseen release.
The long-rumored albumâs unlikely emergence occurred after it was leaked by a 19-year-old hacker. And according to that hacker, it took only about five minutes to dig up Act II: The Patents of Nobility (The Turn), a project that was first announced in 2007 and, thanks to pressure brought on by the leak, released in an official capacity on TIDAL last month (before being taken down quietly not long after).
The album sat in cloud storage of one of Electronicaâs collaborators for eight years, the hacker says, a fact he deduced from the digital time stamp imprinted on it. He claims it was located in a folder with a title that referenced Manhattanâs Jungle City Studios. (Electronicaâs collaborators dispute this claim).
It likely would have remained in that folder indefinitely if the hacker, who insists on remaining nameless but divulges heâs a college-enrolled male in the U.S., had not come across the names of Electronicaâs inner circle and, on a whim, decided to break into each of their laptops.
After only a few minutes, he discovered gold. Act II, a coveted album that had gained folkloric status after being promised and pushed back numerous times over the years, was nestled neatly in a .zip file, its file names nearly identical to a tracklist released by Electronica in 2012. Although the hacker broke in looking for the album, he didnât actually expect to find it.
âI was excited and didnât know what to do with it,â he says. â[I didnât know] whether to keep it to myself or not.â
He decided on leaking it and created a âgroup buy,â which is what happens when an online community pools money together to purchase a product. He set a target funding goal of $9,000 and leaked the track âReal Magicâ as proof that he actually had the goods. The goal was achieved in about two weeks.
Just like that, Act II, perhaps only surpassed by Dr. Dreâs Detox in lost-album infamy, was finally out in the world. But with it brought questions. How did the hacker find the album in the first place? What right did he have to release Electronicaâs fabled opus? And did Electronica agree with his reasoning?
My journey to find the origins of the leak begins in early October, as I start poking around for clues and end up falling into a strange corner of the internet, full of encrypted messages, mysterious aliases, and shadowy industry figures.
I find the hackerâs online identity by tracing the digital footsteps of the albumâs leak: first on Twitter, where whispers are circulating of a large purchase for the project, then on Reddit, where a user tells me of an infamous moderator on the forum LEAKTHIS, an online community with a collective interest in unearthing (mostly illegally) unreleased music.
âHe wonât talk to you lol,â the user warns.
LEAKTHIS members share a mutual admiration for the hacker, often replying to his threads with a goat emoji. But despite his reputation as a reclusive figure, he quickly agrees to talk with me for this story.
âI like providing music for people that otherwise they wouldnât hear,â he explains when I ask him why he leaks projects. âBut I also like collecting songs myself that will never leak or anything.â
Iâm speaking with him through an encrypted app that deletes our message history often. My questions are frequently shut down, as he tries to avoid divulging any details that could lead authorities or other hackers to discovering his real identity. He often goes silent for days, or if I push too hard on the wrong topic, heâll leave the conversation altogether.
He usually comes back, though. Once, after telling me heâs finished speaking with me, he pops up with a name and address accompanied by a blurry selfie picture of a teenage boy. He mistakenly thought Iâd written a recent VICE feature on leaking culture and wants to expose the real identity of the 17-year-old hacker at the center of it.
âGreat job, you guys interviewed a rapist, pedophile, animal abuser :-),â he captions the picture.
Whether he did this because he feels left behind or just because he wants to let me know Iâve chosen the wrong subject, I donât know. It seems to prove that he does hold at least some of the power that users on Reddit and LEAKTHIS claim, though.
Looking through LEAKTHIS, you can see heâs shared unheard gems by beloved artists like TDE rapper Isaiah Rashad, the Weeknd, and Kid Cudi.
And then thereâs his crown jewel, Act II.
âWe werenât going to get the album regardless,â he says when I ask him whether he believes he stole it. âThe album has been nothing but positives for him.â
Heâs quick to point out how itâs earned rave reviews from both fans and critics alike, as well as approval by Electronica himself, who, in a retweet of hip-hop journalist Angela Lee about the project, added: âA.P.I.D.T.A. Allah is indeed the best of planners. Humbled by the love its [sic] receiving.â
Then thereâs the fact that some of Electronicaâs collaborators were in the Discord channel, an invite-only chat platform, that was promoting the group buy. They were annoyed by the leak at first, the hacker says, but then âhappyâ to support it.
Was that the truth? Not quite, according to some of Jay Electronicaâs collaborators.
âThe story [the hacker is] putting out there is definitely not accurate,â says Mike Chav, the audio engineer who worked on Act II and whose Dropbox was the one supposedly hacked. âYou gotta think who stands to benefit from things, and we kind of came to our own conclusions.â
Chav, along with other members of Electronicaâs team (including the rapperâs tour DJ TJ The King), went âScooby Doo detective,â as he puts it, after hearing about the group buy. So they entered the Discord channel in search of clues. What they found didnât add up in their eyes, and they quickly came to their own determination: Someone they knew in the music industry had given the hacker the files to leak.
Their reasoning is based on perceived errors in the hackerâs story: Chav almost never uses his Dropbox to exchange files, he says, and he never used it to transfer Act II, which sits on two hard drives at his home. And while the members of Electronicaâs team acknowledge theyâve used Jungle City Studios before, they say they never recorded any of Act II there, so it wouldnât make sense for the file to be named after it.
Their suspicions were heightened by a longtime âsuper fanâ of Electronica who theyâd met multiple times in person at shows. According to the fan, who approached them in a sidechat on Discord, the hacker had done âbusinessâ with big-name artists before and had contact with another Discord member who was widely considered a figure in the music industry.
This figure, who, based on the fanâs description, Chav recognized as someone once in their inner circle, could have handed the album off to the hacker.
âWhoever created the smokescreen kind of played [the hacker] like a little puppet,â says DJ TJ The King. âOur impression is that some 19-year-old kid from Middle America didnât just stumble upon this, you know? [Electronica] didnât believe it either.â
The hacker tells me that this shadowy figure is in fact âa friend of Jay Electronicaâ but denies receiving Act II from them. They only confirmed its authenticity, he says.
âIâm sure Jayâs team doesnât remember exactly what was where nearly a decade ago lol,â he counters, before adding that he does in fact work with labels, but not in this case. âI help them, they help me, and I donât go to jail.â
Regardless of who you believe, both sides do agree on one thing: Electronica was pleasantly surprised by the leak, even behind closed doors.
âAny other time, Jay would be pissed that this happened,â says TJ. âBut it was like, everyone was on lockdown, and we were supposed to have been on the road⌠So weâre kind of sitting here twiddling our thumbs.â
Electronica, just like Chav and TJ, didnât believe the hacker had anything at first. âTheyâre gonna be mad when they find out itâs just stuff thatâs [already] out,â TJ remembers Electronica telling him when he called to share news about the group buy.
Whatâs more, Electronica was dealing with a death in his family, so his attention lay far off from music. But then the buy was completed for Act IIâor at least the âshellâ that would have been released officially had it gone through the proper mixing, mastering, and clearing channels, TJ confirmsâand his Twitter timeline was set ablaze with reactions to the project. He couldnât believe it.
âI really love [him],â the hacker says when I ask him why exactly he went looking for Act II in the first place. âHeâs been a big influence on my life and helped me push forward when things have been rough.â
The positive response to the album, reiterated vigorously on social media, perhaps washed away an insecurity within Electronica that fans wouldnât like his debut, the main reason it was never officially released, TJ tells me.
âJay thought at the time that people wouldnât like it because it sounds so different from what was popular,â he says, adding that the inability to clear all of the albumâs samples also played a part in its shelving (and most likely its recent pulling from TIDAL).
By that account, perhaps the hacker was right: While it may have not benefited Electronica financially (he wished he could monetize it somehow or even receive the 9K that was raised, TJ tells me), the leak may well have been a positive for him. Not long after its release, Electronica joined the group buyâs Discord channel and even created his own as a way of directly reaching his fans, according to both the hacker and TJ.
âI will say itâs only fitting for it to be released like this,â Chav admits. âLike, more mystery, more weird shit that has continuously followed all of the Jay Electronica projects.â
I tend to agree. For years, Act II was a myth, and then it was here. And then, of course, it was gone again. The hacker, the shadowy figure, the colleagues posing as detectivesâtheyâre all part of the magic trick thatâs been Electronicaâs career.
If we were to follow the rules of a trick outlined in the 2006 film The Prestige, which Electronica references in his project titles, we start with The Pledge, then we go to Act II: The Turn and then we finish with âthe prestige,â where weâre supposed to bring back whatâs disappeared.
In this case, the leak served as the third act. Itâs up to the audience to decide which player was behind it. This brings us to our final suspect: Electronica himself.
As many have pointed out, it wouldnât be out of character for the mysterious rapper to leak his own album. In fact, when I tell friends that Iâm writing this piece, thatâs typically their first question: âDid he do it himself?â
TJ brings up (and denies) the rumors without prompt.
âJay really had songs on there that he didnât want out,â TJ says, pointing to the fact that a handful of verses on the project are rough sounding and mumbled out, seemingly as reference tracks to be recorded properly later. âA lot of people kept thinking, âAw man, Jay leaked it!â Nah, Jay is not the type of person that would leak something.
âJay would take songs off of that and just put them on the internet; heâs done that plenty of times,â TJ adds. âHalf of those songs that were on there, he put out. Maybe two or three songs that no oneâs heard. The songs he wanted people to hear, they were out.â
The hacker denies these rumors, too. The one player who doesnât, of course, is Electronica himself. Like any good magician, he keeps the illusion going.
âEvery trick consists of three parts,â he recently typed out in the group buyâs Discord before mysteriously leaving the channel.
https://www.complex.com/music/2020/12/jay-electronica-act-2-leak-story