{"id":558424,"date":"2026-04-01T15:18:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T15:18:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/558424\/"},"modified":"2026-04-01T15:18:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-01T15:18:09","slug":"i-demand-that-jay-z-perform-all-of-kingdom-come-at-his-yankee-stadium-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/558424\/","title":{"rendered":"I Demand That Jay-Z Perform All Of \u2018Kingdom Come\u2019 At His Yankee Stadium Concert"},"content":{"rendered":"

JA\u0178-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he\u2019s been some kind of recluse the past few years, absent from the public imagination\u2014he\u2019s been doing evil billionaire things<\/a>, laundering the NFL\u2019s post-Kaepernick reputation through the grandiose production of the Super Bowl halftime, escaping Diddy\u2019s dragnet<\/a>, and somehow showing up as part of a fraud charge levied against the Uncle Nearest whiskey brand<\/a>. Music-wise, he\u2019s been quiet: no album, no single, no concert, no significant output since co-starring on Jay Electronica\u2019s 2020 album A Written Testimony. The last time anyone was talking about him in a musical context was 2022, with the verse he did on DJ Khaled\u2019s \u201cGod Did,\u201d which was fine but mostly notable for being long.<\/p>\n

But he\u2019s back now, with a splashy new interview in GQ<\/a>, headlining The Roots Picnic in Philadelphia<\/a> and a couple of Yankee Stadium shows<\/a> in the summer to satisfy our cultural love of anniversaries that are multiples of five. 2026 marks the 30-year anniversary of his classic debut album Reasonable Doubt, and 25-year anniversary of The Blueprint, the album that solidified his place as one of greatest rappers ever, if not the greatest.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Yankee Stadium shows will no doubt be grand affairs: The online ticket queues clocked in at over 800,000 people for each, and of course sold out immediately; they\u2019ve added another date they\u2019re calling \u201cextra innings.\u201d They will likely include some expected special guests (Mary J. Blige, Eminem, possibly a Jaz-O reunion) and a few that might be a little more surprising: Nas, Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Slick Rick, and Q-Tip, who all feature in some way across these two albums. I don\u2019t know, it\u2019s JA\u0178-Z; he might bring out Barack Obama and Oprah. People will spend hundreds and thousands of dollars to go scream every word of his songs back at the man and feel the euphoria of celebration. And Hov will make a few million dollars. Everyone involved will get what they want.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Which is all so, so boring. I have been a JA\u0178-Z fan for more than half of the years I have lived on this earth, and if I could attend the Yankee Stadium concerts, I absolutely would, but also there is no part of me that wants to spend the money it would require. The \u201clegacy artist puts on big to-do in celebration of their monumental album\u201d thing has been done a million different times now. While I recognize the importance of hip-hop artists being afforded the opportunity to reach this point in a genre maligned as a fad and racistly dismissed as having no artistic value, the idea of it still draws me into a yawn. Especially when there\u2019s another idea sitting right there, an infinitely more fascinating one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yes, Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint have big anniversaries this year, but 2026 will also mark 20 years since his absolute worst solo album, Kingdom Come. That\u2019s the Yankee Stadium show I would be eager to see. \u201c[T]he wins are so big that I can see where that can dominate a person\u2019s memory, that you forget the losses,\u201d he told GQ, and Kingdom Come was a massive loss. Even he knows it<\/a>. Billed as a comeback album after his so-called retirement in 2003 with The Black Album, Kingdom Come was an artistic low point that has managed to get even worse over time. Hov grabbed a few pretty good Just Blaze beats that sound like lesser versions of better Just Blaze beats, some bottom-tier Kanye West and Dr. Dre tracks, and perhaps the worst Neptunes beat in existence, and slapped together an album that sounds so desperate to re-establish his relevance, you might have thought we really were in some kind of JA\u0178-Z drought that could be quenched by any dribble from him.<\/p>\n

We weren\u2019t. He hadn\u2019t gone anywhere. He showed up on songs with Kanye, Beyonc\u00e9, Bun B, Young Jeezy, Rick Ross, Lupe Fiasco, dead prez, Pharrell, Memphis Bleek \u2026 there was plenty JA\u0178-Z in those three years between solo albums. He starts Kingdom Come by sounding the alarm, that hip-hop was losing its way (\u201cThe game\u2019s fucked up, niggas beats is banging\/Nigga your hooks did it\/Your lyrics didn\u2019t\/Your gangsta look did it,\u201d as if he didn\u2019t admit a few years before that \u201cI dumb down for my audience to double my dollars\u201d), which in 2006 simply wasn\u2019t true. Nas may have been declaring Hip Hop Is Dead, which someone is always saying, but even if 2006 wasn\u2019t 1996, it was damn good: J Dilla\u2019s Donuts, Remy Ma\u2019s There\u2019s Something About Remy, E-40\u2019s My Ghetto Report Card, T.I.\u2019s King, Ghostface Killah\u2019s Fishscale, The Coup\u2019s Pick a Bigger Weapon, Ice Cube\u2019s Laugh Now, Cry Later, Outkast\u2019s Idlewild (underrated), The Roots’ Game Theory (album of the year), Lupe Fiasco\u2019s Food & Liquor, Lil Wayne\u2019s Dedication 2 mixtape (not my cup of tea, but I respect that it was a thing), The Game\u2019s Doctor\u2019s Advocate, all released before Kingdom Come, and then we got Snoop\u2019s Tha Blue Carpet Treatment, Clipse\u2019s Hell Hath No Fury (right there with Game Theory), and Young Jeezy\u2019s The Inspiration. Maybe you hated Jibbs doing \u201cChain Hang Low,\u201d but hip-hop fans were hardly hurting for worthwhile output at the time.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2006, the game didn\u2019t need JA\u0178-Z, which couldn\u2019t feel good for a man who had positioned himself as hip-hop\u2019s marquee talent, the one who could deliver when everything felt adrift. That insecurity is everywhere on Kingdom Come. No one needed his indictments of hip-hop on \u201cThe Prelude,\u201d \u201cOh My God,\u201d or the title track. His lessons in being a grown-up which were actually lessons in being rich (\u201c30 Something\u201d), or a Cam\u2019Ron diss (\u201cDig a Hole\u201d). Absolutely no one needed to hear him try out a sexy voice next to Usher (\u201cAnything\u201d) or strain to make a statement about Hurricane Katrina with Ne-Yo (\u201cMinority Report\u201d). And no one, anywhere, at any time, not even in the worst version of hell, has ever needed to hear what it would sound like for JA\u0178-Z to collaborate with Coldplay. The whole thing was an exercise in placing ego ahead of artistic expression, coming up empty even on the ego gratification part.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I would love to see him perform it live.\u00a0Not only because it would be the greatest challenge of his career to perform songs only a diehard stan and apologist would readily know the words to, but because it would be an opportunity to expand the ways artists engage with their legacies. Everyone is more than willing to turn over the process that resulted in magic, while only discussing their less-than-stellar work as a stepping stone to something better. It\u2019s unthinkable to consider the failure on its own terms. This is JA\u0178-Z\u2019s chance to move culture again.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And this is bigger than him. A week before JA\u0178 hits the stage at Yankee Stadium in July, the country will no doubt be awash in big, dumb celebrations of the nation\u2019s founding, it being the 250th year since the Declaration of Independence, with the current crop of American psychos in charge making it even bigger and dumber, glossing over our many ongoing failures, aggrandizing a country actively engaged in imperial regime change atrocities abroad as well as the terrorizing and killing of its own citizens. It\u2019s not JA\u0178-Z\u2019s responsibility to provide counterprogramming, though I can\u2019t help but daydream what it might look like to have someone of his stature model what it looks like to do deep, public reflection on what it means to fail\u2014what it means to fall short of the standards and expectations you\u2019ve set for yourself, then examine those failures and their relationship to who you\u2019ve become, to consider the effort it takes to create and the difficulty of sustaining that effort, and figure out how to fold the failure into self-conception, even as it dogs you with regret.<\/p>\n

For the past 30 years, no rapper has enjoyed the amount of critical, commercial, and street-level acclaim that JA\u0178-Z has achieved, but it also hasn\u2019t been 30 years of unbroken successes\u2014he did not one, but two albums with R. Kelly. Forgetting, or obscuring, or neglecting, or deliberately repressing, we are very good at it. I\u2019m interested in projects of remembrance that don\u2019t lose themselves to the triumph found in nostalgia. I want us all to get better at remembering the worst we\u2019ve done, to look at it honestly, to reckon with the parts of ourselves driven by fear, bitterness, greed, and anxiety. I want JA\u0178-Z to explain why in the fuck he made that goddamn song<\/a> with Chris Martin. Seriously, what the fuck was he thinking?<\/p>\n

Since he’s never going to come to terms with the moral bankruptcy of being a billionaire, the least he can do is give us that.<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JA\u0178-Z is coming back, umlaut included. Not that he\u2019s been some kind of recluse the past few years,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-558424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}