Jay-Z releases his 11
th
studio album,
, on Friday—a day that marks the eighth anniversary of both 9/11 and, as he’s intent on reminding us,
, a 2001 album regarded as one of his finest, which hit record stores that same fateful Tuesday. Invoking the World Trade Center attacks as part of a marketing strategy is, at best, strange and, at worst, crassly self-aggrandizing. But what else is new? It’s by now a commonplace that in rap, self-aggrandizement is an art form unto itself, and few practice it as capably, convincingly, and entertainingly as the MC who nicknamed himself Jay-Hova.
Last night, though, Jay-Z descended from the heavens for a semi-secret concert at the Blender Theater at Gramercy, a 600-capacity concert hall. (Thanks to a naming-rights deal that, apparently, has yet to expire, the venue is named for a music magazine that no longer exists .) This is a fairly small room by indie-rock standards. For an artist of Jay-Z’s stature, it was practically a concert in someone’s basement, and the evening crackled with the excitement of seeing a star typically framed by Jumbotrons standing so close.
On Jay-Z’s recent single, ” D.O.A. (Death of Autotune) ,” he draws a line in the sand between his mainstream audience and his “street” audience, pledging to honor the gritty and uncompromised values of the latter. Last night, he continued in this vein with a boisterous set that leaned harder toward the brash and blaring than the silken. He performed, as he has been doing for several years now, with a live backing band whose task was to play along with or simulate altogether music originally produced by synthesizers and computers—sometimes the band offered the music a newfound jolt; sometimes it clobbered it. (One of the appeals of Timbaland’s beat for ” Jigga What Jigga Who ” is its sleek digital skitter, but the band approached it with a hard-hitting, almost rap-rock-ish brutality.)
After an hour, I saw something you don’t often see at Jay-Z concerts: a snafu. Fire alarms interrupted a track (for a moment it sounded as though the DJ had dropped a particularly mean remix), techies rushed onto the stage to check wiring, and Jay-Z disappeared without a word—presumably to a gold-plated helicopter idling out back. Firemen were called, the crowd milled, and in about 15 minutes, Jay-Z returned and launched back into his set without explanation. Two firemen stood wide-eyed at the back of the room, stunned to realize who was onstage. There was a thick smoke in the air, but not the kind you’re surprised to smell at a concert.
