MSNBC anchor Ari Melber, who hosts The Beat, has been weaving Hip-Hop into his reporting for years—it’s kind of his thing.
Following the recent announcement of JAŸ-Z’s upcoming concerts at Yankee Stadium—one celebrating the 25th anniversary of The Blueprint and the other honoring the 30th anniversary of Reasonable Doubt—Melber got to work and cooked up a detailed report on JAŸ-Z’s extensive career.
“The huge demand for the new concerts shows how these classic albums still resonate 25 years later,” Melber told AllHipHop. “‘You gotta pardon Jay, for selling out the stadium in a day!’— to flip a line. So in this extensive report, we tried to probe why: the poetry’s timeless relevance, the prescient calls for artist equity and JAŸ-Z’s skill at translating the streets for civilians, while bringing Wall Street blueprints to the masses. It’s all the more powerful that JAŸ-Z’s boasts and plans on that debut album, 30 years back, have now become his real life.”
Rumors that Hov was planning something substantial began last month, when fans noticed he’d reverted back to using an umlaut above the “Y” in his name, the same stylization he used for Reasonable Doubt.
Soon after, the Roc-A-Fella Records co-founder revealed two Yankee Stadium shows would take place on July 10 and 11 (he later added another show scheduled for July 12).
He was then announced as the headliner for the annual Roots Picnic in The Roots’ hometown of Philadelphia on May 30. He also re-released “Dead Presidents” on streaming and dropped the video for “Wishing on a Star” featuring Gwen Dickey on YouTube.
Two historic nights to celebrate the iconic albums Reasonable Doubt and The Blueprint
JAŸ-Z 30 on Friday, July 10 JAŸ-Z 25 on Saturday, July 11 Yankee Stadium
Needless to say, Melber had a lot of material to pull from.
As part of his report, he talked about Jay’s impact on Hip-Hop culture, saying, “Jay’s rise helped elevate Hip-Hop to heights unimaginable for the elites who smugly dismissed it as ‘noise,’ a ‘fad,’ a crime soundtrack with no redeeming value. He did so by confronting those barriers in his music—not pandering—channeling truths that resonated both within rap’s community of origin and far beyond it.”
Melber further highlighted how far JAŸ-Z has come since his days living in the Marcy Projects and hustling on the streets of Brooklyn, using Hov’s verse from Jay Electronica’s “Shiny Suit Theory” to drive home his point.
“It’s a long ways from where Jay-Z started,” Melber says in the clip below. “This path may have sounded delusional back then, a contrast he narrates in an imagined dialogue with his psychiatrist convinced that his dreams are fantasies and he’s lost it.”
“Quack said I crossed the line ‘tween real life and fantasy/Can it be the same one on covers with Warren Buffett?/Was ducking the undercovers, was warring with muh’f######/Went from warring to Warren, undercovers to covers/If you believe in that sort of luck, your screws need adjusting/In the world of no justice and black ladies on the back of buses/I’m the immaculate conception of rappers-slash-hustlers.”
Love him or hate him, JAŸ-Z’s influence on not just Hip-Hop but also business cannot be understated. Melber’s full report is below.
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