After years of focusing on one-off appearances, Jay-Z returned to the stage for three spectacular concerts in front of tens of thousands of people in his hometown of New York, the last disrupted by major logistical problems.
Organized in the packed Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, the three evenings saw a host of stars take the stage alongside the rapper, including his wife Beyoncé, Rihanna, Eminem, Pharrell Williams, Alicia Keys, Usher, Nas and Pusha T.
The third concert, Sunday evening, was marked by a delay of several hours.
According to the organizers, “hundreds” of fans tried to enter without tickets, forcing security to close the access and then open it slowly.
Result: spectators with tickets took hours to get in – some claiming on the networks that they never got there – and Jay-Z arrived on stage after midnight, visibly upset and apologizing for the wait.
Businessman
But after the incident, the crowd roared back to the successes of the 56-year-old rapper, ending with his mega hit “Empire State of Mind”, which has become the unofficial anthem of a city where each of his performances is hailed as a return to the roots.
“There are few hip-hop artists capable of filling a venue as legendary as Yankee Stadium. Even rarer are those who achieve this by relying essentially on a repertoire dating back several decades,” observes Timothy Welbeck, researcher in African-American studies at Temple University, to AFP.
Jay-Z’s last album (“4:44”) dates back to 2017. But for two of his three concerts, he chose to focus on opuses dating back 30 years (“Reasonable Doubt”) and the second 25 years (“The Blueprint”), both having marked the history of hip-hop.
If he has more or less abandoned the stage and the studios, it is above all because the former small-time drug dealer from Brooklyn has today become a full-time businessman, the first billionaire rapper in history according to Forbes, financially involved in sport, spirits, the media and fashion.
Paris and London in September
Far from the street rap that forged his beginnings, the couple he formed with Beyoncé, another global superstar, has also reinforced his status as a glamorous icon, the two regularly appearing among the most influential personalities in the entertainment world.
Back on stage, the artist returned to the origins of his art, sharp. Stringing together titles, not necessarily hits, without letting go of the microphone for a second throughout the show, surveying the stage with obvious joy in a rather bare-bones setting given the gigantism of the place.
In the crowd, to each song, thousands of voices echoed back to him, a large part of the audience knowing the long texts of his songs by heart.
After filling Yankee Stadium three times for a cumulative total of 135,000 to 140,000 people, Jay-Z will perform in September at the Stade de France – which is not yet full -, as well as in London at the Tottenham stadium then finally in Los Angeles.
As a prelude to other new projects?
“Speculation is rife that a new Jay-Z album will be released later this year. If it were to see the light of day, this record could lead him to undertake a larger tour,” says Timothy Welbeck.
