On the trail of Jai Paul
Attempting to untangle the musical enigma of Rayners Lane
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London is brilliant at producing intense - if somewhat niche - objects and scenes of popular culture fascination.
Some are hyperlocal and a bit esoteric (hello Persepolis), some are name-dropped by outmoded monoculture vultures in major cities across the world even though they aren’t objectively that interesting (Monmouth, Palace), and some are just grey and kind of strange but you know there are definitely forums in Japan and trivia-discussion groups in West Williamsburg dedicated to dissecting them (Peep Show, The Barbican, the seat covers on the Bakerloo line).
Despite being given the opportunity, London doesn’t tend to excessively celebrate or denigrate these things or mindlessly milk them into hyper-commercialised husks (come on, we’re not Singapore, LA, or Dubai). But we still seem to be a bit surprised when others don’t know a lot about them or fail to produce detailed opinions on their history.
I’m not sure where Jai Paul falls on this spectrum of cultural arcana. No one is really. He’s the kind of musician that a certain kind of Instagram meme page would endlessly lampoon you for if you based more than 10% of your personality on being a fan of his, and he hasn’t made much music since people first heard of him sixteen years ago. Yet the B-press around him, while still relatively small, is fevered and obsessive.
Just who is this man? Where does he actually live? Why are there almost no photographs of him? Why do people seem to celebrate spotting him on the tube? Why is there no actual way to contact him? What kind of a DJ-slash-producer doesn’t have an active Instagram/Twitter/Soundcloud/Spotify bio/Boiler Room set? And how is he showing up at one of the “largest, most famous, and most profitable” music festivals in the world later this year?
A condensed Jai Paulography
Jai (pronounced JAYY) was born sometime around 1989, in Rayners Lane, North West London. We don’t know what schools he went to but he presumably had a mostly normal childhood, as there is little primary source material to suggest otherwise.
I hung around Rayners Lane for two afternoons; once under the guise of doing research for this piece and once to attend a funeral - but neither visit produced scintillating results. As you’d imagine, trying to reach out to Jai or his brother A.K. wasn’t particularly easy. I texted Desi friends from Harrow (area, not school) to see if anyone knew about this man or if anyone’s cousin went to sixth form with him: zero hits.
As I walked past the Alexandra Avenue KFC where Jai apparently intermittently shows up during weekday lunchtimes, passing the Saravana Bhavan and MTR on the way, I pondered questions like ‘Which would have a better masala dosa at noon on a Tuesday?’ and ‘What is it about slightly dreary and cold suburbs that creates such a fertile ground for 2010s young British electronica inspiration?’. Was I retroactively applying this label to any new cultish producer? Was Vegyn from Rayners Lane as well?
In 2007, around the time Jai was farting about HA2 chicken shops, he uploaded some music to MySpace and last.fm, and started laying the tracks for his eventual cultification.
Archived forums dedicated to unpacking Jai’s entire discography (some of which run into more than 2000 pages of entries) made reference to the “lost” ZX tapes, a mythologised series of tracks uploaded by Jai in the late 2000s and which have since disappeared.
Three years later, the ‘created-in-under-an-hour’ track, BTSTU, becomes Jai’s first ‘official’ release and gets him signed to XL Recordings. Zane Lowe calls it the hottest record in the world, Radio 1 puts him on a Sound of the Year list. A comment from someone called ‘Jai Paul’ on a 150-word music blog entry from 2010 suggests that the acronym stands for “Back to Save the Universe.”
BTSTU solidifies Jai’s reputation as a venerable hit-maker with high potential and, through XL, the song gets sampled by both Drake and Beyonce. Suddenly Jai is at least partly responsible for creating music by two of the commercially successful musicians of the 2010s.
The types of people that say things like “but do you know where the sample is from” start holding their breath for Jai to release a fully-fledged album. He is on the cusp of international stardom but it is still really cool to be into his MySpace uploads… Until something bizarre happens. A rough cut of 16 tracks, 37 minutes in length, gets uploaded to Bandcamp. The tracks are supposedly not by Jai, but no one really knows who they are by or who uploaded them…
For the next ten years or so Jai retreats into the shadows, occasionally reappearing to release one or two tracks, put out easter-egg laden multimedia projects, and set up the Paul Institute, a sort of music think tank, with his brother.
A few weeks ago, I started messaging Mahira, (@hira.world), a British-Indian producer who makes things like A.I. inspired music, and creates graphic design for Joja Smith. Hira started featuring on Paul Insitute productions around 2017. I didn’t expect him to reply to me but, when he did, I realised I couldn’t ask him about Jai. The thought of enquiring about their show at the Laylow club, or whether he would put me in touch with him or someone from his team just made me feel unwell.
I realised that Jai, a man who perhaps unintentionally cultivated a mystique around himself, maybe just doesn’t want to give any interviews or talk about himself, despite the decade and a half of opportunities to do so. Maybe the silence is Jai trying to make a comment about the spectacle of modern celebrity. Or maybe he isn’t trying to make a point at all?
Moncler, but no genius
In attempting a more serendipitous run-in than lingering outside a tube station, I attend an over-the-top, music-oriented event during London Fashion Week. A luxury, Italian outerwear maker has offered 10,000 free tickets to the riff-raff to see Alicia Keys perform and walk around some kind of collaboratively-branded deep-tech x fashion-art installations filled with kinetic sand, robot plushies and Blade Runner extras wearing thousand quid gilets.
For some reason, I thought maybe Jai would be there.
At the event I jump a barrier and get into a ‘VIP’ area, where I run into rappers, athletes and Instagram models. I linger for a couple of hours then leave when, inevitably, I don’t see Jai. As I join the thousands of bodies swarming onto the overground, I beat myself up for thinking that he would even consider patronising something so commercial. In my head, once Jai had announced a Coachella set, that meant he was maybe ready to shed his shadowy image and finally rebrand as a magazine-cover DJ who shows up at fashion-week parties and releases an NTS segment.
The industry seems to love Jai (or is it more appropriate to call him Paul?), and I don’t mean the pop-superstar samples, I mean “we’re actually just friends with this bloke” type of love. In 2013, Riz Ahmed (F.K.A. RizMC), forever an authentic promoter and supporter of brown homegrown talent, rapped over his biggest production. The track was briefly up on YouTube and SoundCloud but it has since been completely scoured from the internet, presumably because of the Immortal-Technique-meets-early-Eminem lyrics (or maybe it’s an example of the diligent curation of Jai’s online presence).
Jai is credited as helping produce some tracks on Childish Gambino’s 3.15.20 and he had a thirty second cameo in an episode of Atlanta - the kind of thing that really makes it seem like Donald Glover just wanted to involve him in something.
Meanwhile, Jungle have said that “without Jai Paul, there would be no Jungle” and Kaytranada has declared his willingness to quit his own performance to go watch JP instead. This is a musician’s musician.
Keeping the Paul rolling
In a letter from 2019, Jai opened up for the first time about his reaction to his music being stolen and leaked online.
He sounded saddened and, in retrospect, realised he had naively placed too much faith in the City of London police in finding the thief and retrieving something from their laptops. He talked of the long-term effects created by loud opinion pieces that had accused him of leaking his own music as a ploy to “feed the internet sausage machine,” and how he was forced to explain himself over and over again as, “for the next 3 years or so this one event was all anybody asked me about”.
In those circumstances, you too might consider taking a step back from the limelight.
Now, a full decade on, the news of the Coachella performance seems to suggest that Jai Paul is ready to release new music and perhaps even tour; and the rabid expectation being generated is rivalling that surrounding Frank Ocean’s headline spot (another artist that hasn’t really produced new music since 2016).
Recently, someone commented that Jai’s British citizenship should be revoked for doing his first ever live performance in Los Angeles, but I bet your actually-really in-the-know mate will find out when he pops up in a Hackney basement sometime between now and early April.
Until then, we continue to wait.
Maazin is a London-based cultural commentator that mostly writes about food, he briefly cooked in a couple of West London restaurants. He can normally be found bouldering, haggling for mid-century furniture, or tearing rolls of expired 35mm film.