Waiting for Jay-Z
It was nearing midnight on a balmy Sunday in July, and there was still no sight of Jay-Z. This was the last of three sold-out concerts at Yankee Stadium, and somehow the tens of thousands of fans gathered inside didn’t appear too aggrieved, peaceably bopping along to old soul tunes on the P.A. and eating chicken tenders out of souvenir boxes shaped like Timberland boots. We take the magnitude of Jay for granted. “I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can,” he once rapped, a boast that’s come to seem less outlandish with time. No other artist has withstood hip-hop’s changing winds over such a long span, let alone won so many of the bets he placed on himself. Rap shows aren’t known for being tidy, punctual affairs anyway—what was another hour?
Then again, this was a crowd over-indexed in forty- and fiftysomethings, a demographic that would really feel the consequences of a late night come Monday morning. What drew so many people to these concerts, as well as to recent stadium shows in London and Paris this fall, was a sense of nostalgia and a perception of scarcity. Jay-Z’s previous solo tour was in 2017, after the release of “4:44,” an absorbing, stripped-down record full of post-therapy insights meant to repair his image after rumors of infidelity—transgressions that might have been bad enough even if his wife was not Beyoncé. The following year, the couple released “Everything Is Love,” a renewal of vows in album form, and toured Europe and North America as a double bill. In the near-decade since, Jay-Z has chosen his moments of visibility sparingly, appearing mostly as a power broker playing in one-per-center sandboxes. Although his gravitational effect on how people dress, what they sip at the club, and how they structure their bars has weakened, his presence is felt. “We tote guns to the Grammys, pop bottles on the White House lawn,” he rapped on “So Ghetto,” and it was a good, mischievous line back in 1999. But he has since become someone who texts Barack Obama, and who curates the most high-profile concert in the world, the Super Bowl halftime show.
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The first night of the Yankee Stadium residency celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of Jay-Z’s début album, “Reasonable Doubt,” which he performed in its entirety, bringing out guests such as Beyoncé, Nas, and Alicia Keys. The following night, he did “The Blueprint,” from 2001, again with high-wattage support. Neither of these victory laps was preordained: hip-hop is a young person’s sport, and when “Reasonable Doubt” was released there was little reason to believe that Jay-Z, then twenty-six years old, would end up one of the greats. In the mid-nineties, the genre was dominated by prodigious, fully formed young talents such as Nas and the Notorious B.I.G. Jay had emerged a few years earlier, as the sidekick to a playfully spry Brooklyn rapper named Jaz-O, and had returned to selling drugs when both of their careers stalled. He eventually began to release his music through Roc-A-Fella, an independent record label that he’d started with some friends.
Jay-Z was early to realize that New York’s influence on hip-hop was waning, and that the lines dividing styles, regions, and genres were no longer as important as they once were. After “Reasonable Doubt,” a soulful, bruising masterpiece inspired by his native Brooklyn, he proved to be a shape-shifter and a shrewd collaborator, working with rappers from the South when this still seemed like a daring thing for an East Coast artist to do. In the five years between “Reasonable Doubt” and “The Blueprint”—which was released on September 11, 2001—he went from being yet another New York rapper scrapping for relevance to being hip-hop’s undisputed king. And then he somehow kept ascending, sanding down the edges of his persona until he became the quintessential celebrity of the Obama era, back when the notion of doing unprecedented things and entering off-limits rooms felt transgressive enough. He invested in restaurants, created beverage and clothing lines, and became a part owner of the New Jersey Nets, helping oversee the team’s relocation to Brooklyn. In 2005, he rapped, prophetically, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.”
This last concert of the Yankee Stadium run promised to be a career-spanning revue—an enticing pitch, as the later albums have felt more like exercises in brand management. “Magna Carta Holy Grail,” released in 2013, was initially a free download exclusively for Samsung customers; “4:44” seemed partly an attempt to boost subscriptions to Tidal, a streaming company that he owned. Maybe, for Jay-Z, these were the only victories worth pursuing anymore. Perhaps after years of fending off challenges from rival New York rappers, there was a novelty to hanging out with Bono and Chris Martin—or Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner—instead. This was as plausible an explanation for the delay as any: a guest on the level of a world leader. With Jay, anything seems possible.
When Jay-Z first announced his return to the stage, he sat for an extended interview with GQ, complete with a photo shoot by the artist Rashid Johnson, whose work he collects. His comments illustrated the unique burden of the hip-hop superstar, straining to stay in touch with the grimy realism of his earliest rhymes. He wondered aloud if rap’s hypercompetitive battle culture, as recently embodied by Kendrick Lamar and Drake, had become too much of a liability. (“I don’t know if it’s worth it at this point.”) He called the rising tide of anti-billionaire sentiment in America a “cop-out,” sounding slightly defensive. His wealth hasn’t changed his sense of morality, he explained. “A person with more money can do more good. . . . This is the system that we have. And with the system that we have, what are you going to do?” The elephant in the room was a lawsuit, filed in 2024 and withdrawn in 2025, in which an anonymous woman had accused him and Diddy of sexually assaulting her when she was a teen-ager. “That shit took a lot out of me,” he said. “I was angry. I haven’t been that angry in a long time.”
Jay-Z opened the first night at Yankee Stadium with a kind of State of the Union freestyle. He hinted that Colin Kaepernick, the former N.F.L. quarterback, whom many believe to have been blackballed by the league for his advocacy against police brutality, wasn’t as righteous as we thought. Jay argued that he had chosen a less showy way to make change, advocating for criminal-justice reform out of the spotlight. “I’m the one they can’t control,” he rapped, suggesting that Kaepernick had taken an unreported payout from the N.F.L. and dismissing the “Twitter activists” who didn’t see the long game of his backroom advocacy.
The backroom becomes literal in “Jaÿ-Z in 8,” a new eight-part documentary series on HBO featuring the rapper in conversation with the producer Rick Rubin, who has been anointed a mascot of sorts for the notion of creativity. Each episode shows the two men sitting in the Palais Brongniart, in Paris, listening to Jay’s songs on a very nice sound system, and talking about them. “This is like elder wisdom,” Rubin says excitedly, after playing “Don’t You Know,” a preternaturally mature track from 2002. “It’s really wild,” Jay agrees. “I don’t know where it was coming from.”
Their conversations drift from Jay’s memories of his late, long-estranged father to his experience with therapy, measuring the distance between the brash playboy of then and the fifty-six-year-old family man of now. The series ends up being the latest retelling of a story that fans know well at this point—I still prefer “Fade to Black,” from 2004, a behind-the-scenes film about the making of “The Black Album,” and “Decoded,” from 2010, an autobiography co-authored with the journalist dream hampton. What distinguishes this new project is Jay’s obvious delight in having Rubin, the eccentric naïf, as his interlocutor and audience. (Rubin played the same role for Paul McCartney in “McCartney 3,2,1,” a six-part documentary from 2021.) “You knew so much,” Rubin effuses about the early music. “It’s amazing.”
The pair’s narration of Jay-Z’s life doubles as a history of America in the past half century, beginning with the economic collapse of New York in the seventies, running through the rise of rap, the crack epidemic, and the war on drugs, and landing on the eventual pathbreaking successes of the hip-hop generation. Jay has always skillfully folded each turn into his larger mythology, going from drug dealer to rapper to label boss to executive with an air of inevitability, every choice subsumed into the glory of the hustle. “Have you been the same person the whole time?” Rubin asks innocently. No, Jay replies. He was constantly becoming someone different.
It was Monday by the time Jay-Z took the stage. As the introduction to “The Dynasty: Roc La Familia” pulsed through the Stadium, he stepped out wearing a Yankees cap and a bespoke pin-striped workwear suit, looking like the most elegant handyman on Earth. His band turned the song into a headbanger’s delight; Jay remained steady and regal over the crunching guitar chords and cathartic drum kicks. When it was over, he took a moment to explain the delay. Some fans had breached one of the entrances without paying, leading security to shut down the entire Stadium. Jay had insisted on waiting until every ticket holder was allowed in before performing. But he promised that he would not be shortchanging us.
Jay was limber and cocky, unhurried as he prowled the stage. We had been waiting for four hours, desperate for a release, yet he was assured and deliberate with every move. His strength in the late nineties was a kind of calm under pressure, and his power in the next decade was translating that swaggering cool for ever-larger stages. Songs that felt tense and claustrophobic on the records—such as “Where I’m From,” a track from 1997 about the Marcy Projects—became seismic events when performed live.
At one point, Jay removed his jacket and revealed what appeared to be a bulletproof vest—a nod to the “Streets Is Watching” video, from 1998, when his paranoia toward his rivals was at its highest. The delirium of the late hour only deepened as the guests came out: Jeezy, Teyana Taylor, Jermaine Dupri, Usher, Swizz Beatz, Rihanna (who briefly out-swaggered Jay), Pharrell, and Beyoncé, backed by the Mayyas, a Lebanese dance group. These were all stars he could either claim credit for making or consider of equal stature. Even more impressive was how they had all stayed hours past their presumed call times. I felt silly for thinking that the evening’s guests might have been fellow nineties stalwarts such as M.O.P. or Cam’ron. The legacy that Jay wanted to broadcast was not one in which he acknowledged his generational peers, many of whom are more likely to feature on back-in-the-day podcasts than on new tracks.
For a couple of hours, it was easy to forget who Jay had become, and to instead marvel that he was still here at all. So many of the supporting characters of his rise were absent, whether they had lost their place in his inner circle, such as his Roc-A-Fella co-founder Damon Dash, or died before their time, as with the Notorious B.I.G. and DMX. Of course, there was no Diddy or R. Kelly, both incarcerated for sexual misconduct. The most auspicious absence was Kanye West, Jay’s estranged former protégé, who is arguably the only other solo rapper who could draw crowds of this size.
An elevated subway train rumbled by in the distance, just past the outfield, a reminder of the city beyond. How could Jay-Z possibly stay connected to the world that his music was designed to escape? Standing in the audience, I thought about hearing “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” for the first time, recognizing that it was sampling the musical “Annie,” and finding this both absurd and totally irresistible. I remembered how effortlessly Jay took to hip-hop’s evolutionary turns in the late nineties and early two-thousands, moving from New York’s stoic classicism to the squeak and space-age funk of producers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. I thought about the hours I’d spent in the d.j. booth trying to figure out how to mix in and out of “Big Pimpin’ ” or admiring the blunt simplicity of “Money, Cash, Hoes,” which still sounds to me like someone getting frustrated with a keyboard and throwing it down a stairwell.
I looked around and imagined everyone was similarly adrift, all of us in our own orbits, with Jay the common gravitational center. Yankee Stadium felt small and intimate. My friend and I left during the encore, as he began “Empire State of Mind,” a song that became so ubiquitous during the Knicks playoff run this spring that I never need to hear it again. It seemed more sensible to beat the traffic. ♦