Eric Adams' son has a cold

Fran Magazine: Issue #124

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Gormenghast update…

I’ll be honest: I’m very behind on Gormenghast for Mervyn September. I’ve had a few different reading assignments pop up for work that have taken priority and those, on top of NYFF obligations, have made it a trickier month than otherwise anticipated. I defer to you, Fran Magazine Gormenghast readers, on the path ahead. Should I just post a discussion thread once I’ve finished the book, regardless of shared timeline? Is anyone caught up on Gormenghast? What are you all thinking and feeling about this and do you think I’m being “sort of annoying” or “very annoying” about this whole thing?

Anyway, as I caught up with all of my various assignments, Phil said, “I should review Eric Adams’ son’s new album for the magazine,” to which I said, “yes, of course you should.” Please enjoy that review below.

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Phil Magazine

Note: Jayoo’s lyrics are not available online. As a result, the lyrics quoted and discussed in this piece have been transcribed by ear, and may potentially differ from what Jayoo wrote.

On September 11th, 2024, while Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Donald Trump and JD Vance all gathered together in downtown Manhattan to commemorate of the 23rd anniversary of the worst terror attack in American history, Jordan Coleman was in the lab, recording music in his makeshift studio at Gracie Mansion, where he kitted out the room with bisexual lighting and an ugly, downtown gallery-style painting of Frida Kahlo. His father, Mayor Eric Adams, presumably elsewhere in the Yorkville estate, was also skipping the 9/11 solemnities, out sick with COVID-19.

Coleman, a self-styled rapper-filmmaker-entrepreneur, has released two albums and a slew of loose singles under the name Jayoo (pronounced, hilariously, “J.O.”). Despite, or perhaps because of, his father’s considerable spotlight, none of his music has had any kind of major breakthrough. In fact, at the time of writing, only one track has surpassed the one thousand play threshold required for a song’s streaming numbers to display on Spotify: his 2022 track “Itsy Bitsy,” a sexy club banger that Coleman performed on an Albanian television program in the style of The X-Factor or American Idol, has 1,734 plays.¹ Were it not for his father being Eric Adams, the scandal-prone mayor of New York City, there would be nothing to differentiate Jayoo from the scores of other medium-talented struggle rappers that populate every major metropolitan city in America. But his father is Eric Adams, the scandal-prone mayor of New York City, and so Coleman’s music, despite its surface mediocrity, merits a deep dive in order to see what, if anything, can be learned about NYC’s First Son and by extension, Mayor Adams himself.

Most of Jayoo’s music could be described as filler: lyrics full of gasconade and trite, obvious wordplay laid over generic and forgettable production. On a technical level, it’s not totally incompetent. The quality of rapping varies from track to track, but generally speaking, Jayoo knows where the bar line is and how to cross it, he stays on beat, and his lyrics, though frequently vacuous, do rhyme. The influence of Drake looms large, evident in the 40-lite beats that populate his debut album JORDAN, which directly references the Toronto rap giant and alleged pedophile twice: the closing track, “4pm In Bergen,” is an homage to Drake’s iconic [time of day] in [city name] track title format, and on “Down,” Jayoo raps, “She said I’m sounding like Drake, fake/ Know I’m a rapper/I got the Jimmy I’m shooting a slice at the snakes, smoking Degrassi/with shots of the henny while she take it all to the face.”

It’s hard to determine what exactly Jayoo means by this; it’s true he does sound like Drake, or at least like a rapper whose biggest influence is Drake — but is he calling the woman in question fake for making the comparison? Or is the comparison itself fake, as in without merit? Either premise is totally undercut by the lazy and confusing bar that follows, a muddled triple entendre referencing Jimmy Brooks, Drake’s character on Degrassi, as well as Jimmy’s Pizzeria (shooting a slice), a chain of unremarkable NYC pizza shops. Is the Jimmy he’s got a gun? Are the slices he’s shooting bullets? It’s impossible to say, as any reference to firearms or violent criminal activity in Jayoo’s music is carefully filtered for plausible deniability. On the refrain of “G.I. Jayoo,” he raps, “Gotta stay strong when I’m lifting the piece/because my fam got some different needs.” If this was a relatively unknown New York City struggle rapper whose father was not the mayor, taking the bar at face value would be easy: the piece being lifted is a gun. Because this is Jayoo, and especially because he immediately ties “lifting the piece” to his family and their “different needs,” it’s much less clear what exactly the piece is supposed to be. Across his catalog, this obfuscation of illegal activity lends a uniquely anodyne quality to his otherwise forgettable music. Plenty of would-be rappers going in over “2022 Drake Type Beat” instrumentals adopt a gun-toting persona, embellishing or outright lying about their criminal bona fides and sexual conquests, but only one of them has to square these kinds of street-cred fibs with being the mayor’s son. “Everything I do is legal, I got to play it fair,” he raps on the 2022 single “Spice Talk Homage,” before following it up with “First time I sipped lean, spent two hundred on the Uber.”

Amidst the generic braggadocio that makes up the bulk of his music, glimpses of Jayoo’s real personal life shine through. He’s never not rapping about being next up, being good at rapping, or running the city, or drinking and smoking, or riding on a private jet, but he has also has a bachelors degree in communications, he’s an aspiring writer-director, he’s horny, and his dad is Mayor Eric Adams. 

Consider “Spice Talk Homage,” when he casually tosses out “Riding around the city I feel like the mayor,” a line which is on its face as generic as anything else, but knowing his connection to the mayoral office makes it feel like a little lad in a sailor suit with a big spiral lolly proudly telling you he feels like papa; or when he references his internship at The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, or when he says “Sci-fi movie script, and I’m writing shows,” which is undoubtedly true, but feels odd when tossed in between lines about a decadent, jet-set life. In a Drakean moment of vulnerability he opens “4pm in Bergen” with, “taught my pops the jump shot so he could play Obama,” which is the closest he ever comes to endearing. Elsewhere his insecurities show up: on “Lookin Like,” he briefly tells of an interaction with a woman who rejected him for not being tall enough,² before brushing it off: “Her Loss,” the rallying cry of sexually available short kings everywhere. 

Occasionally, though, these moments of real life feel decidedly sinister, like when he mentions people he knew in his childhood who are in prison now. What is left unsaid, is that they very well could’ve ended up there as a result of Mayor Adam’s aggressively pro-prison, pro-police policies. On the track Starters, he auto-croons “I ain’t a cheap little thrill, babe, I’m just like my father,” a line that, taken in consort with “If I spend a check, can you spend the night here for me?” from “Lookin Like,” takes on a darker affectation in light of the sexual assault lawsuit brought against Mayor Adams in 2023, which alleges that Adams allegedly brought a woman to an abandoned parking lot and allegedly pressured her for alleged oral sex in exchange for career favors. The sins of the father, yes, but paying for sex, directly or indirectly, is a common theme in Jayoo’s music (as is having sex in a parked car, something most people stop doing around their eighteenth birthday). Later on “Lookin Like,” he raps, “Sweet tooth around the pussy, taste the rainbow/take my shit to Ghana can’t fuck with these lame hoes,” which is a far cry from Mayor Adams’ interpretation of their trip to Ghana, which he described as a spiritual journey where he went searching for his roots. Perhaps the most shocking and damning line in all of Jayoo’s oeuvre comes when he seems to say “the only capping I do is for the cabinet.” With all of the other line-toeing in his music, this is something of a revelation. Is he referring to that time when Eric Adams claimed he lived in Bed-Stuy and not New Jersey, giving a tour of an apartment that clearly looked like it belonged to a twenty-something male who eats meat? Or cap of a more serious caliber? It’s impossible to know but with more and more members of Adams’ inner circle coming under federal investigation, having something like “the only capping I do is for the cabinet” on record feels like a poor choice.

This is, of course, an uncharitable read on Jayoo’s music. Most of it is simply derivative pop-rap, overconfident and critically lacking in genuine creative spirit — classic nepo-baby solo project bullshit — but it is interesting the way his hustle mentality meets insecurity meets vague organized crime allusions (a persona cribbed wholesale from Drake) (allegedly) mirrors the attitude and milieu of his father. One might say the apple don’t fall far from the tree, that the (big) apple’s rotten right to the core from all the things passed down by apples coming before, etc…

In the interest of brevity (and hopefully making Substack email length so you don’t have to read it the app or browser) we’ll wrap it up here, but for those of you who still have Jayoo fever, here’s some other bars that were really cracking me up:

“Put that out, I can’t smoke and rap at the same time”

This has got to be one of the lamest things any rapper has ever said. I learned how to smoke and rap at the same time when I was 14 years old.

“Communications for the bachelors, still I’m bad at texting”

It’s these little flourishes of personal experience combined with the mind-numbing mundanity of everything else he says that makes his music, in its way, special…

“My life is a sandwich, I roll with, I started with bread on the bottom and now I need bread on the top.”

What??? WHAT?!??

“When I’m repping my city I feel like the mayor”

We already discussed how funny it is to say you feel like the mayor when you’re dad’s the mayor, but I’m almost charmed by how often this motif works its way into his music.

“I need a freak who’s ready to go in the car or the sheets”

One of SOOOOOOOO many bars about having sex in your car. This guy loves car fucking! Not even road head! He’s always doin’ it in the back seat! Maybe at Make Out Point… on Lovers Lane… I just heard on the radio about this maniac with a hook for a hand that escaped from the local insane asylum… That’s not too far from here… Hey, did you hear something? I think someone’s there… I don’t know Jayoo, I’m scared…

1.  Coleman made it to the semi-finals.

2.  In pictures, Coleman appears to be as tall as his father, who is allegedly 5’8”.