As the intro of his song \u201cGirls, Girls, Girls\u201d poured over the crowd at SoFi Stadium late Friday night, Jay-Z locked eyes (from behind his ever-present shades) with a guy near the stage whose excitement had bubbled over at last.<\/p>\n
\u201cOh, this yo s\u2014,\u201d the rapper observed with a knowing little laugh. \u201cYou was waiting for this s\u2014 all night long.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dude was lucky not to wait even longer: The first of two SoFi gigs, Friday\u2019s show was an almost comically overstuffed display of hits by an aging cultural giant in the middle of a legend-reclamation project; Jay-Z performed parts of three dozen songs over two hours, which was still only a fraction of the 152 entries he\u2019s notched on Billboard\u2019s Hot R&B\/Hip-Hop Songs chart since 1996.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe got a million of these,\u201d he said after doling out a few verses of \u201cOn to the Next One\u201d \u2014 not bragging so much as explaining.<\/p>\n
Having earlier visited stadiums in London, Paris and his hometown of New York, the 56-year-old is in Inglewood this weekend as part of what he\u2019s calling JA\u0178-Z30: a yearlong celebration of himself timed to the 30th anniversary of his debut album, \u201cReasonable Doubt,\u201d and the 25th anniversary of his commercial high point, \u201cThe Blueprint.\u201d Last month, HBO premiered an 8-part docuseries in which Jay-Z combs through the minutiae of his songwriting with the producer Rick Rubin; any day now, the rapper is expected to announce that he\u2019ll return to SoFi in February to headline the halftime show at Super Bowl LXI.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a lot of action for an artist who\u2019s spent much of the last decade in \u00e9minence-grise mode \u2014 Jay-Z\u2019s most recent solo album, \u201c4:44<\/a>,\u201d came out in 2017 \u2014 but he seemed in fighting trim Friday, moving nimbly through the songs that made him a superstar and helped put hip-hop at the center of pop music. He was backed by a muscular live band (complete with horn players and a string section) that could push the music toward plush soul, sticky funk or crunching hard rock; \u201c99 Problems,\u201d in particular, made you think about how funny it\u2019ll be, if indeed Jay-Z ends up at the Super Bowl, to see a rapper bring big guitars back to an event that rock fans love these days to lament.<\/p>\n Jay-Z\u2019s daughter Blue Ivy joined him to play piano during \u201cThe Story of OJ\u201d and \u201cDead Presidents II\u201d; he beamed as she walked offstage afterward \u2014 a moving vision of fatherly pride. He also brought out Scarface, the veteran Houston MC, to do \u201cThis Can\u2019t Be Life\u201d and Scarface\u2019s Geto Boys classic \u201cMind Playing Tricks on Me.\u201d A pair of OGs still competing in a young man\u2019s game, the two traded compliments before parting: \u201cJay-Z is a killer,\u201d said Scarface, whom Jay-Z hailed as \u201cone of the best writers of any genre.\u201d<\/p>\n With a set list that jumped freely among albums and eras, the concert felt a little scattershot; it wasn\u2019t always clear what story Jay-Z was trying to tell about his life and career beyond the glorification of his success. And you have to wonder how a man who\u2019s found work as an event planner \u2014 booking the halftime show falls under the purview<\/a> of his Roc Nation company \u2014 could end the night so anticlimactically with an appearance by a past-his-prime DJ Khaled. (It didn\u2019t help that many in the audience were anxiously awaiting Jay-Z\u2019s wife, Beyonc\u00e9, who performed with him at Yankee Stadium but didn\u2019t show on Friday.)<\/p>\n The evening\u2019s emotional peak came maybe two-thirds of the way through in \u201cNever Change\u201d and \u201cSong Cry,\u201d two tracks from \u201cThe Blueprint\u201d written by a guy in his early 30s struggling with how \u2014 or whether \u2014 to hold onto his complicated past. That he performed them here as a middle-aged billionaire proved he figured it out; that they were so lush with the pain of nostalgia proved he remains an artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the intro of his song \u201cGirls, Girls, Girls\u201d poured over the crowd at SoFi Stadium late Friday…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":656068,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[34431,2707,146,6764,41619,90221,85,46,15415,409,12605,2076,61035,73097,3263,178420,2702,295123,33123],"class_list":["post-656067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-blueprint","tag-debut-album","tag-entertainment","tag-event","tag-friday","tag-girls","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-jay-z","tag-music","tag-part","tag-pop-music","tag-rapper","tag-scarface","tag-show","tag-sofi-stadium","tag-song","tag-super-bowl-lxi","tag-young-man"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/656068"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}