Jay Z Got the Key

It’s been a decade since Jay’s knocked around our northwest corner. We’ve watched him move from street documentarian to respected label president, making fashion and matrimonial stops along the way, all the while releasing bomb after banger. It’s no mistake his latest album went number 1, taking him over Elvis into the history books: he’s a living, breathing single machine.

The opening acts? Not so much. N*E*R*D was the second tier’s largest name, but the Neptunes-produced I Just Wanna Love You during Jay’s set drew bigger cheers. That said, we definitely enjoyed watching the crowd lose its collective mind when Drop It Like It’s Hot revved up.

We have a low win/lose ratio when it comes to live hip-hop. For every Roots or Tech N9ne, there’s an MF Doom or Six Mix-a-Lot. Add to that the Key Arena is not a music venue. We know they hold shows there and everything, but it’s more a matter of capacity and location than one of acoustics and sightlines. It’s a place for saying you were in a room once with that guy where the lights were very pretty and great muffled whumps stole away with your hearing. You’d need to be a giant to hold a room like this.

And Jay-Z is one of the biggest. Rising from beneath the stage to sustained applause, Jay prowled back and forth as he spit line after line of new single Run This Town, from the third iteration of his Blueprint series. As we expected, the new album dominated the set list, but it didn’t deter the audience; they sang the hook for an absent Pharrell and shouted punchlines like collective hypemen.

But it was the early hits, late in the show, that got the crowd on the bounce. Big Pimpin’ and Hard Knock Life played epic, as the backing band locked in on Jay’s unstoppable flow. What we loved was how Jay’s personality kept peeking through his swagger. During the penultimate song, a tech ran out to fix a drum mic just as the band was about to level up. “Hold it, hold it, hold it,” Jay commanded, stopping the music cold. “Hey, big man, come out here.” Meekly, the tech came to the front of the stage. He looked like a puppy about to take a newspaper. “Yo, what’s your name?” “Marco.”; “Well, Marco, right now we’re in the part of the show where my band goes off. But we need the people to be making noise. Tell em.” “Hey, everybody, make some noise!” Marco has a grin now. “Now why don’t we watch my band do this from the best seat in the house.” Then the two of them stood—an unlikely, awesome pairing—at stage lip, their backs to us as the band picked up and took off.

We were indifferent going in, converts coming out. It was more than a show. It was an event.