Jay-Z Brings New York Flair to Philadelphia for Triumphant Roots Picnic Performance Featuring Jazmine Sullivan, Bilal and Meek Mill: Concert Review

As it turned out, Jay-Z had been quietly setting the stage over the past few months for what we could expect during his headlining show at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia. On streaming, he’d changed his name from Jay-Z to its original spelling, JAŸ-Z, perhaps a wink and a nod that it would be a tried-and-true career retrospective. Then, he started digitizing his singles catalog, releasing studio versions of classic tracks along with their radio edits — a subtle reminder that, amid all the headlines that have dogged him over the past few years, those songs have shelf lives that stretch back to the deep recesses of the 1990s, and formed the backbone of a career that’s been built piece by piece across the bookends of two millennia.

On Saturday night, the rapper’s first headlining solo show since at least 2019 was certainly a reinforcement that Jay-Z is still one of the best rappers alive, if not the preeminent emcee of his generation. His hour-and-a-half set was in fact a career retrospective, but not as a play for nostalgia — yes, these songs have been woven deep into the fabric of pop culture, but they sounded just as fresh and powerful as they did when they were rolled out, delivered by a long-seasoned veteran whose performance powers have somehow continued to strengthen outside of the encouraging glow of the spotlight.

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Jay-Z could have used this rare performance to flaunt his accomplishments or reassert his standing as the GOAT, as guest Meek Mill attested before and after performing “Dreams & Nightmares.” He hasn’t released a solo album since 2017’s “4:44,” a very long break for an artist who dropped a project every year between 1996 and 2003. That absence has allowed for murmurs of doubt to seep in and create a space for a new enclave of rap fans to dismiss his music as generationally specific despite his very real track record and influence over pop culture.

And it’s why his Roots Picnic performance resonated so strongly. Jay-Z doesn’t have anything to prove — only earlier this week did Drake beat his record for most No. 1s on the Billboard 200 among solo men and R&B and hip-hop artists — yet he leveraged the show as an opportunity to instead pay homage to the city that was hosting him while dressing it in his own hometown flair. It was a refocusing, a celebration of Philly culture set against the New York skyline, with native guests spanning Jazmine Sullivan and Bilal to Freeway and Beanie Sigel meeting him on the playing field for a creative melding of two worlds.

Jay-Z was backed by Philly heroes the Roots, with whom he famously collaborated for his 2001 live album “MTV Unplugged.” That taped performance and subsequent record release were an inflection point in showing a different side to the rapper, one whose ambitions were artistically deeper than the surface level of his commercial success would suggest.

Twenty-five years later, their creative synergy has only strengthened. The show was muscular, a one-off that brought them back together for a tour of Jay-Z’s catalog with the Roots’ ability to make precision look spontaneous. That much was hidden in the details — the interweaving of “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)” and “Big Pimpin’,” for instance, or the sudden switch from “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” into “I Know” — and was clearly a labor of love. (Jay-Z himself acknowledged this at the end of the set: “We worked really hard to put this together.”)

But you wouldn’t know it, as Jay-Z’s set came across as loose and relaxed. He began with “Hovi Baby,” a calling card song to set the tone for the evening. (“Hola Hovito,” often maligned, could have been a good stand-in, too, despite what some readers may want to argue here.) The hits kept coming — “Run This Town,” “N—s in Paris,” “Excuse Me Miss” — as did the deeper cuts and fan favorites like “Can I Live” and “Never Change,” songs that lined the tracklists of his most iconic albums.

Part of the thrill of a Jay-Z concert is the parade of guests he’s all but guaranteed to bring out, and in classic form, he delivered. Bilal, who had performed a solo set earlier in the day, popped out to take the reins from Frank Ocean on “No Church in the Wild”; Jazmine Sullivan sang the hook from “Feelin’ It,” then performed her breakthrough single “Need U Bad”; Meek Mill did “Dreams & Nightmares”; and State Property essentially reunited as Beanie Sigel, Freeway, Peedi Crakk, Memphis Bleek and Young Gunz all took turns on the mic. (Amillion, unfortunately, is still gone.)

The other part of the thrill is his willingness to address the controversy swirling around him. His Summer Jam performance in 2001 was historic for how baldly he discussed his issues with Prodigy and Nas via the live debut of “Takeover,” and his “I Declare War” concert in 2005 reunited him with Nas to a rapturous roar, despite the show’s namesake.

Much of the social takeaway from his Roots Picnic performance is already focused on the four-minute freestyle that he delivered just after “Hovi Baby,” an entirely acapella song that he said he purposely omitted from rehearsals with the Roots, perhaps to stave off concerns about its reception. Like clockwork, within minutes of the performance, speculation was flying that he was responding to pokes from former collaborators Drake, Nicki Minaj and Kanye West, the artist now known as Ye, asserting how attacks have done nothing to diminish his standing.

Sure, it may have been a petty move, but it wasn’t beneath him, even for someone who just two months ago wondered aloud if beef was still good for hip-hop. Like he’s done in the past, he used the freestyle as a way to weaponize his words with wit, not anger, to show that greatness is something that’s earned even in the face of contention. He shrugged it all off while landing some jabs — “Questlove introduced me to Jaguar, I dunno why I still fuck wit him” was a particularly hilarious barb — in an ultimate testament to his cool.

After all, who is Jay-Z to break a sweat? At 56, he’s 30 years out since his debut, and even further from his first few appearances on records. He’s slated to take several victory laps in July with three back-to-back shows at Yankee Stadium, two of which are honoring the 25th and 30th anniversaries of his albums “The Blueprint” and “Reasonable Doubt.” If the Roots Picnic performance was just a warm-up, then Jay-Z is very well on track to have the summer on lock yet again, without so much as a new single to his name.

Jay-Z’s full Roots Picnic setlist:

Hovi Baby
Freestyle
U Don’t Know
FucskWithMeYouKnowIGotIt
N— What, N— Who
Run This Town
Jigga My N—
No Church in the Wild (with Bilal)
Where I’m From/Marcy Me
Dirt Off My Shoulders
I Know
Never Change
Feelin’ It (with Jazmine Sullivan)
Need U Bad (Jazmine Sullivan solo)
Can I Live
The Story of OJ
Dead Presidents I & II
Excuse Me Miss/La La La
You, Me, Him and Her (with Memphis Bleek and Beanie Sigel)
Gotta Have It (Beanie Sigel and Peedi Crakk)
Roc the Mic (Freeway and Beanie Sigel)
Flipside (Freeway and Peedi Crakk)
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop (Young Gunz)
What We Do (with Freeway and Beanie Sigel)
Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)…
I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)/Big Pimpin’
Public Service Announcement

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