As his song “Girls, Girls, Girls” was introduced to the crowd at SoFi Stadium late Friday night, Jay-Z made eye contact (from behind his ever-present shades) with a boy near the stage whose enthusiasm had finally subsided.
“Oh, it’s yo s—,” the rapper said with a light laugh. “You’ve been waiting for this all night.”
Dude was lucky he didn’t have to wait much longer: the first of Sophie’s two shows, Friday’s show, was an almost comically exaggerated performance of hit songs by an aging cultural giant in the midst of a legend-recovery project; Jay-Z performed parts of three dozen songs in two hours, which was only a fraction of the 152 entries he has made on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart since 1996.
“We got a million of these,” he said after belting out a few verses of “On to the Next One” – not so much bragging as explaining.
Having previously toured stadiums in London, Paris and his hometown of New York, the 56-year-old is in Inglewood this weekend for what he’s calling JAŸ-Z30: an annual festival commemorating the 30th anniversary of his debut album, “Reasonable Doubt,” and the 25th anniversary of his commercial high point, “The Blueprint.” Last month, HBO premiered an 8-part documentary series in which Jay-Z delved into the intricacies of his songwriting with producer Rick Rubin; Any day now, the rapper is expected to announce that he will return to SoFi to headline the halftime show at Super Bowl LXI in February.
It’s a huge action for an artist who has spent much of the last decade in éminence-gris mode — Jay-Z’s most recent solo album, “4:44,” came in 2017 — but he looked trim Friday in battle, moving nimbly through the songs that made him a superstar and helped bring hip-hop to the center of pop music. They were backed by a strong live band (complete with horn players and a string section) that could push the music toward stately soul, sticky funk or crisp hard rock; “99 Problems”, in particular, makes you think how much fun it would be, if Jay-Z actually made it to the Super Bowl, to see a rapper bring the big guitar back to an event that rock fans love to lament these days.
Jay-Z’s daughter Blue Ivy joined him to play piano during “The Story of OJ” and “Dead Presidents II”; He then smiled as she walked off the stage – a touching vision of fatherly pride. He also brought out Scarface, veteran Houston MC, to perform “This Can’t Be Life” and Scarface’s Geto Boys classic “Mind Playing Tricks on Me.” A pair of OGs still competing in a young man’s game, the two complimented each other before parting ways: “Jay-Z is a killer,” said Scarface, whom Jay-Z hailed as “one of the best writers of any genre.”
With a set list that bounced freely between albums and eras, the concert felt a bit scattered; It was not always clear what story Jay-Z was trying to tell about his life and career beyond glorifying his success. And you have to wonder how a guy who’s got a job as an event planner — booking the halftime show falls within the purview of his Roc Nation company — could end the night in such an unforgiving way with an appearance from their ex-head DJ Khaled. (It didn’t help that many in the audience were anxiously awaiting Jay-Z’s wife, Beyoncé, who performed with him at Yankee Stadium but did not appear Friday.)
The evening’s emotional peak came perhaps two-thirds of the way through with “Never Change” and “Songs Cry,” two tracks from “The Blueprint,” written by a man in his early 30s struggling with how – or what – to keep up with his complicated past. That they performed him here as a middle-aged billionaire proves that they’ve got it figured out; He was so full of the pain of nostalgia that he proved that he remains an artist.