Jai Paul
BIOGRAPHY
We don’t know much about Jai Paul. Nobody does really, but let’s start with what we do know...
1) He’s definitely signed to XL Records.
2) His full name is Jai Raj Paul.
3) The name of standout and thus far only available full track ‘BTSTU’ stands for ‘Batistuta’, according to his old MySpace profile.
4) As we’ve mentioned before, he was very much the most exciting artist of 2010, and he’ll carry that over in to 2011.
Perhaps it’s Paul’s secretism that makes him all the more exciting - the songs featured in this article are genuinely all you seem to be able to get your hands on, and they’ve got a combined running time of just over five minutes. Since the blogosphere truly ‘broke’ Jai Paul last year, there’ve been rumours aplenty as to what he’s been up to: the has he or hasn’t he signed to XL debate, is ‘BTSTU’ actually a demo from as long ago as 2007, and indeed, what happened to Bait Ones, Jai Paul’s expected 2010 EP release?
Jungle Drum (Jai Paul Remix) by Three New Ideas
There’s certainly an argument that your somewhat savvy new music connoisseur has never had so little to judge an artist on, yet here he is as our artist of the week a few months after we first mentioned him over at ‘Three New Ideas’. And what has he done since then? Nothing. We’re far from the only ones blowing his trumpet though - he’s was recently announced alongside James Blake and Yuck as an artist featured on the BBC’s Sound of 2011 poll.
The reason for all this is breakthrough track ‘BTSTU’ - from the opening gambit of “Don’t f*ck with me, don’t f*ck with me” to the dubstep basslines, bleeps, glitches and harmonies, it comes across as a pop masterclass, but an oddity of one at that. Forced comparisons have been made all over the board: D’Angelo, Prince, Hot Chip, J Dilla and M.I.A, but ultimately it would be that Jai Paul sounds like little else currently and that’s certainly the most exciting thing about him.
Jai Paul - Baby Beat by Three New Ideas
There’s not much we can do with Jai Paul now apart from to carrying on listening to the pop genius of ‘BTSTU’, his brilliant remix of Emiliana Torrini’s ‘Jungle Drum’ and try and guess the rest of ‘Genevieve’ and ‘Baby Beat’ until the Bait Ones EP finally drops in full - but we can be sure that when it does it’ll have instant classic stamped all over it.
Jai Paul - Genevieve by Three New Ideas
If 2010 was the year of a lo-fi punk resurgence with bands all over going back to their CD collections and taking the best part of their grunge years to heart, then it looks like 2011 is the turn of kids that listened to hip hop at lunch times, wrote lyrics on their phone at the back of the bus and bashed out beats at home on Fruity Loops until it made them famous. The guy leading that pack will be Jai Paul.