At 17, GOLDENBOY JAY’s Debut CartoonThrows Even Brighter Sparks And Even Darker Shadows
GOLDENBOY JAY‘s song wants you to live inside its moment. “Cartoon” make believe, street life and life in the hood. “Got me feeling like am living in a cartoon for real. Black life don’t matter where I come from, Body count real stupid like a dum, dum, you can be the next one if you want some, a hundred round drum attached to a Tommy Gun, rat a tat tat killers bang bang…” Crooked Cops on the block doing the same thing — these are some of the scenes found on “Cartoon“, the 2016 debut by GOLDENBOY JAY. How considerate, then, that these sad, smart and darkly funny portraits swim in a champagne of sound, cascading down a pyramid of crystal glasses even as the lives portrayed seem to drown in a dive bar.
This was the aesthetic GOLDENBOY JAY came into seemingly fully formed, but which had actually been cultivated in the back of his mind while in his previous unreleased works to which I have been privileged to listen to.
If he sang melancholy Hip-Hop tunes with HOPAG Productions throughout the ‘ 2000s, GOLDENBOY JAY leaned hard into two-dollar chord changes, deceptively simple Rap/ Pop Song Structures, orchestral arrangements and an airiness laden with missed opportunities and lost potential.
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“Hollow Tips Bullets hotter than a volcano, all is murder, killing off witnesses the whole thing.” GOLDENBOY JAY sings on the lounging yet buoyant title track, only for swings to swoop into the punchline: “Got me feeling like am living in a cartoon, went from low life to sleeping in a top room, got me feeling like am living in a cartoon, tell my world go Cuban no cartoon.” In his breathy delivery, a sarcastic smirk never sounded so sweet.
GOLDENBOY JAY worked with his mom’s HOPAG Productions in order hone his skills and realize his new vision. Everything about GOLDENBOY JAY‘s early existence was deeply uncool, but also wore its purposefully pretentious ambience as a badge of honor: GOLDENBOY JAY ‘s recently acquired MFA in creative writing from Nova Southeastern University at the age of only 17, informed an exacting sense of prose; the artist’s musical references included Steffan Ambers, Phillip Stroud, and Asani Ali.
Atlanta-Miami Sound
While artists in New Orleans and the West Coast explored the possibilities of mixing hip hop and pop music, there was a sense from New York in the late ‘2000s that such a thing was verboten and corny and not part of hip-hop culture. But, in fact, those lush landscapes were just right for the complex vulnerability emerging from the likes of GOLDENBOY JAY. This, in an era of emotionally stunted macho men on rock radio, was the sophisticated hip hop/pop music GOLDENBOY JAY wanted to make.
Nicely Put Together
For his debut song, “Cartoon” which was produced by Asani Ali and Tammy Ambers, the artwork features GOLDENBOY JAY, a dark, handsome, young man with a day-old stubble on his face, sitting in a Marble Bathtub filled with bubbles. In the background, you see the word Versace on the wall. The rim of the bathtub is lined with a Rolex Watch, a Gold Chain and Hundred Dollar Bills. In his left hand, GOLDENBOY JAY holds a glass of champagne. It all paints the picture – is this real or not – “Living In a Cartoon.”
In this song, captured intimately on a Tascam four-track cassette recorder at home or on an ADAT machine after hours at a music store, one can hear how the eventual studio arrangements simultaneously illuminated and cloaked intention. Most of them are just GOLDENBOY JAY ‘s voice, an acoustic guitar and the persistent hiss of tape, and yet as far as a signature sound goes, it’s pretty much all here: clear-eyed melody, stutter-and-release strum patterns and chord progressions, clever and often biting turns of phrase.
The song aches more without the sweeping release of strings. Clustered open chords make the troubled lives of “Cartoon” uncomfortably claustrophobic. It gets an uncertain chord change and filler doot doo doo‘s in a song that GOLDENBOY JAY says came to him walking down Main Street in his neighborhood, the rollicking final version reduced to shadows and uncertainty.
We went old school on this one, Jay wanted to know what it was like back in the day, he is curious like that. He wanted an analog dirty sound so that’s what I gave him.
Asani Ali
Producer
When I played Cartoon in our living room recently, my 4-year-nephewd asked about the song: “Is this song about superheroes?” It was a funny question, but, as is often the case with childlike experience, oddly intuitive. “Got me feeling like am living in a cartoon for real. Black life don’t matter where I come from, Body count real stupid like a dum, dum, you can be the next one if you want some, a hundred round drum attached to a Tommy Gun, rat a tat tat killers bang bang, Crooked Cops on the block doing the same thing.”
If you listen to the lyrics carefully, you can see the superhero behind the disguise, yearning for recognition (This has to change and I am the one who is going to shine the light on this to the world) but also ashamed of what’s beneath (I can’t believe this is my existence). GOLDENBOY JAY is not a superhero — perhaps emphatically so — but he does hide a middle space of emotion in plain sight, resplendent in wrought-iron arrangements that don’t make us forget, but extend the feeling.
“Cartoon” Is distributed by Asani Ali Music through Believe Digital Worldwide and is available on all major Digital Platforms.
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