Jay Taj

Jay Taj is a Westside Santa Ana rapper of Chamorro descent who started putting out music in the early 2010s and dropped his debut album TENFOUR in 2016. He reached a national audience as runner-up on Season 2 of Netflix's Rhythm + Flow in 2024, and his show songs "Believe Me" and "Make Me" now have millions of Spotify plays. On June 3, 2025, Councilmember Thai Viet Phan presented him with a certificate of recognition from the City of Santa Ana. Two weeks later he returned it at a council meeting to protest the mayor's response to anti-ICE protests in the city.

OC Weekly covered TENFOUR in 2016 as his first full-length project, a record about life, love, stress and setbacks while trying to stay grounded in Santa Ana, and compared its storytelling to Kendrick Lamar's good kid, m.A.A.d city, with Santa Ana standing in for Compton. Back then he named J. Cole, Kanye West, Black Thought and Kendrick among his influences, played keys and drums, and hosted shows on Dash Radio.

Rhythm + Flow's producers found him on Instagram. On Season 2 he competed against more than 30 rappers in front of judges DJ Khaled, Ludacris and Latto, with Eminem as a guest judge. While the season streamed in November 2024 he released LITTLE JERRY DEMOS, a six-track EP named after his childhood nickname. He told REVOLT about building the show records with name producers: STREETRUNNER spent an eight-hour session reshaping the guitars on "Believe Me", D. Smoke joined him for a writing session, and he built a track from scratch with 30 Roc, the producer behind Roddy Ricch's "The Box."

His YouTube channel also carries live sessions recorded at Red Bull Studios, including "MOMMA CALLED," "CAN'T LOSE" and "LITTLE JERRY 4 LIFE." By November 2026 he had about 45,000 monthly Spotify listeners, more than 102,000 Spotify followers and 45,600 YouTube subscribers, and Netflix's clip of his battle with Rhome had passed 1.6 million views.