I just finished watching the movie ‘the Prestige’ (2006), which I can highly recommend, and I realized suddenly that Jay Electronica took major inspiration from it and I would love to hear other parallels between the movie and Jay Elecs music.

Michael Caine who plays Cutter in the movie explains that: “Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course… it probably isn’t. The second act is called “The Turn”. The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it, because of course you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know. You want to be fooled. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.”

Jay Elecs’ first EP is called Act I ‘Eternal Sunshine (the Pledge)’ and we learn that he is very much into movies (Charlie & the Chocolate Factory, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and, The Prestige). The final seconds of the EP have a quote from the movie: ‘are you watching closely?’

The most important magic trick in the movie is about making the magicians disappear, which is what Jay Elec did. After releasing Act I, he disappears until this year, in which he released ‘A Written Testimony’, which is in fact, Act III. It was rumoured that Act III was titled ‘Act III: the last will & written testimony of Timothy Elparado Thedford (the Prestige)’. The new title lost some words, but it is still his final act.

So us, his fans, are the audience to his performance. With Act I: the pledge and he disappears and reappears, not in place, but in time, 13 years later, thus performing Act III: the prestige. We wonder what happened, but we did not get to see Act II: the turn, until Jay Elec it put out asAct II: the patents of nobility (the turn), after it surfaced online. Its name might have a good reason: Kate Rothschild, whom Jay Elec dated, is of nobility. Was his disappearance was due to his affair with her?

If his disappearance is part of his perfomance, it might be the greatest in hiphop ever. In the movie, it is about sacrifice for the trick. Did he sacrifice his career for this performance? Did he trick all of us? Or am I watching too close?