He’s the king of rap, there is none higher. Not Kanye, spinning ever further from reality and into “Reality”. Not Drake, too caught up in his own heartbreaks to harbour ambitions for the throne. And not his former nemesis Nas, nor any of the other pretenders who’ve proved they lack the HOVA’s stamina. Because for two decades, Shawn ‘Jay-Z’ Carter has treated his career like a marathon, not a sprint, transitioning from bullet-holed Marcy Projects crack-dealer to respected MC, business mogul and music industry player. In his own words, a businessman and, also, a business, man.
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Tonight, he walks onto a sparsely decorated stage – just lights and a 40-foot tall metallic inflatable dog – with hood pulled over his baseball cap, face hidden, launching into a five-track blitz from his latest album, the dark, often brilliant 4:44. It’s an uncompromising move, in stark contrast to his legendary Glastonbury 2008 set when, goaded by Noel Gallagher’s jibes that hip-hop had no place at Worthy Farm, he delivered a force 9 display of stagecraft, covering Wonderwall and stealing the weekend.
Here, though, he’s unforgiving, revelling in the bleak, monochromatic power of the 4:44 material, not apologising if these songs leave a certain chill in the air. One of his best albums, 4:44 is, perhaps, also his most newsworthy. The album was trailed with rumours it would offer Carter’s take on the soap-opera-worthy recent events within his marriage to Beyonce – the public confrontation with her sister Solange in a hotel elevator, following an alleged infidelity Bey referenced on Sorry off her wounded, often autobiographical Lemonade album last year. Its lyrics have been dissected by at least as many gossip columnists as music critics, trawling for scandalous morsels.
But though full of revelations, 4:44’s mea culpas offer no juicy tabloid tidbits. Tonight’s opener, Kill Jay-Z is blunt, startling, revisiting a litany of sins – shooting his brother, selling drugs, getting high – before losing himself in a nightmare where he “let the baddest girl get away” and another man is playing football with his kids. It’s a moment real as any street tale from his earlier work, visceral and intense enough that it’s a relief when he grins and hollers, in reference to the soul star who let Halle Berry slip through his fingertips, “N****, never go Eric Benet”.
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The new material loses some of the audience, snapchatting their mates and awaiting a crowd-pleaser. But this is electric stuff and clearly important to him. The Story Of OJ is a simmering meditation on how black success is still radical but also how fame and material success can’t insulate you from racism. Tonight he keeps revisiting its hookline, “Light n****, dark n****, faux n****, real n****”, in a moment that’s ruminative, uncomfortable, hypnotic. The theme is revisited on Family Feud, though here – again – Jay-Z finds himself caught in recriminations, admitting “I’ll fuck up a good thing if you let me” and “a man that don’t take care of his family can’t be rich”, before a pre-recorded Beyoncé vocal lifts us from all this painful introspection.
Jay says tonight’s the first time the new material has been performed live and it’s mostly front-loaded in the set, perhaps to see how audiences respond to this unfamiliar fare. The album’s title track, a wracked, way-past-midnight confession that lays the fault lines of Bey-Z marriage open to an almost forensic degree, doesn’t appear at all tonight, perhaps a step too far into the darkness. The set’s later turn towards the greatest hits many tonight expected is handled gracefully, Jay strutting like a prize-fighter as he delivers the final verse of Big Pimpin’ a Cappella, dad-dancing to the Max Romeo sample of Lucifer and leading a heavily metallic, strobe-lit assault on 99 Problems. New York State Of Mind, meanwhile, makes a choir of the V crowd, all lost in the bittersweet hope of Alicia’s chorus, while Jay dedicates a closing Numb, from his collaboration with Linkin Park, to that band’s Chester Bennington, telling the crowd to “make some noise so he can hear you in heaven”.
The hits attest to the strength and consistency of the Jay-Z catalogue, but 4:44 can’t help but feel like a turning point – finding its strength in vulnerability, swapping swagger for introspection. Jay-Z’s kept the throne not by resting on his laurels but by always changing, always challenging himself. This new material is some of his best yet, because here he’s challenged himself to be more honest than ever before – drawing from his own inner conflict, proving that colossal fame and outrageous fortune haven’t deadened his lyrical invective, or fenced him off from his sense of who he is, and where he’s from. Perhaps that nakedness, that honesty makes for uneasy festival headliner fare but it also delivers the most powerful moments tonight. by theguardian.com
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