![]() ![]() Throughout Bait Ones, Paul sounds like he’s battling his own tentativeness, as he oscillates between indecision and bravado. But now, Paul’s tendency to leave threads dangling seems less like soothsaying and more like a compulsion: We may never know exactly how unfinished a lot of these tracks are, because Jai Paul may never know, either. All of it hinted at a keen understanding of the forever-tweaking online realm years before Kanye deemed his morphing The Life of Pablo a “living, breathing, changing creative expression” in 2016. The titles of 11 of the 16 songs here are amended with a word that serves as a lowkey warning, and a reminder: “Unfinished.” This is a little ironic, considering how the excitement of Paul’s music was always tangled up in its undoneness official early singles “BTSTU (Edit)” and “jasmine (demo)” both had parenthetical notes in their names, suggesting eternal works in progress. ![]() “It’s completely surreal to me that this music will now exist officially in this form, unfinished, and even sequenced by the people who leaked it!” he admitted, adding that, “Much of the tracking and production work was there, but it’s a shame about the scratch vocals and the overall mix.” Paul himself commented on the awkwardness of the endeavor in his statement. Generally though, perhaps the most surprising thing about this peculiar re-release is how much hasn’t changed. Instead, an engineer combed through Paul’s archive of high-quality files in order to find the closest matches to each leaked song, according to his label, XL. The fidelity of Bait Ones is sharper and richer than the low-quality leaked version, though the tracks were not remixed. To be clear, there are some differences between the original leak and this new version: Both are 16 tracks long and run around 38 minutes, but Bait Ones does not include some of the goofily endearing snatches of dialog from “Gossip Girl,” Harry Potter movies, and Tomb Raider video games due to sample-clearance issues. Then, everything fell apart.īut the sketchy tracks that now comprise Bait Ones endured for good reason. Leading up to the 2013 leak, some of the feverish anticipation surrounding Paul’s official debut album involved the widespread notion that it was high time for him to fully claim his place alongside such peers-and that, if things fell into place, he could very well surpass them all. James Blake was stretching Destiny’s Child songs into alien new shapes Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon was wailing on Kanye records Rostam Batmanglij was toying with Auto-Tune in Vampire Weekend and Discovery Frank Ocean was covering Coldplay with startling sincerity. When Paul arrived at the start of the decade, he found himself among a vanguard of innovative and ambitious musicians who were opening up a dialog with the major pop establishment. ![]() Both tracks, which also appear on Bait Ones, are at once propulsive and elusive, like quicksand pumping out of a speaker cone, with Paul’s mumbling falsetto self-consciously buried in the mix (in the recent note, he mentioned, “It will always be a little painful for me to listen to myself.”) Here was a guy in his early 20s spiking his obsessions with J Dilla, Michael Jackson, and D’Angelo with uncanny pauses, flyby instrument breaks, and laser zaps-a meticulous introvert whose slippery sound was soon being sampled by Drake and Beyoncé. On the couple of songs he properly released before the leak, “ BTSTU (Edit)” and “ jasmine (demo),” he bent pop music to his off-kilter will. The official release of the unofficial document Paul has decided to call Leak 04-13 (Bait Ones)- Bait Ones being a slangy working title for the project during the original sessions-brings with it a sense of closure, of finally wrangling some dominion over chaos.Īn ability to control the uncontrollable is part of what made Jai Paul’s music so mesmerizing in the first place. He wrote of a withdrawal, a breakdown, and a slow trek toward recovery, aided by therapy. “Looking back, it’s sad to think about what could have been, but it is what it is and I had to let go.” Elsewhere in the statement, he candidly discussed the seismic breach of trust he felt following the initial leak as well as an unmoored feeling of being perpetually misunderstood. “I’ve grown to appreciate that people have enjoyed that music and lived with it, and I accept that there is no way to put that shit back in the box,” the 30-year-old wrote. On June 1, along with two totally new songs, Paul put this work that was once ripped from his hands onto streaming services as well as his own website, alongside a heartfelt note to fans. ![]()
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