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Review: Onstage Jay-Z Forgoes Distractions, Drilling Down to the Message
ANAHEIM, Calif. — Since the mid 1990s, Jay-Z has set the bar high, often unattainably so, for hip-hop’s ambition and triumphalism. Age can remake you, though. In June, Jay-Z released “4:44,” his 13th studio album, his first in four years, and his first in a decade that didn’t use maximalism and bombast as its guideposts. Instead, it was an excavation, and a contemplative, measured one at that. Jay-Z is 47 now, and the time has come to look inward.
And yet for all the flash in his music, Jay-Z has always been an unflashy performer — he’s not antic and never overexerts. The effectiveness of his concerts comes from how effortlessly he holds the stage, one man carrying the weight of a genre, and still gliding.
That was still mostly true at the Honda Center here on Friday night, at the opening show of his “4:44” tour. For an hour and a half, he held the stage at the center of the floor like a prizefighter, the whole arena gazing down upon him as he flexed familiar muscles.
On their recent tours, his inheritors like Drake and Kanye West have been taking to the skies and reimagining the space of an arena. But floating in the air would somehow be beneath Jay-Z, who built his career on cocky ease. Instead, he worked an octagonal stage that rose and fell throughout the night, sometimes placing him atop a small mountain, and other times rendering him approachable. (Unlike at the recent Meadows Festival, there was no oversize Jeff Koons balloon dog.) His band was strewn across three pits that flanked the stage, and four folded screens hovered above him, showing different camera angles from the stage and, during interludes, footage of peers and family members, from Beyoncé and Blue Ivy to Mr. West and Marina Abramovic.
Jay-Z worked his way through snippets of more than two dozen songs, from all segments of his two-decade-plus career. He was caustic during “99 Problems,” reflective on “D’Evils” and “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love),” exuberant on “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and “Big Pimpin’.” Before performing the bubbly “______ in Paris,” a song he and Mr. West used to play up to 12 times a night on their “Watch the Throne” tour, he explained that what from a distance appeared to be a celebration was in fact something much more textured about coming from “places where people counted you out” and then “overcoming those odds and proving everybody wrong.”
Motivational speaking was a recurrent theme during this show. “Anybody in here from the bottom? Anybody in here from the mud?” he asked before “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem).” After “The Story of O. J.,” which he dedicated to the civil rights activist Dick Gregory, he mentioned with exasperation how the owner of the Houston Texans recently said that the N.F.L. “can’t have the inmates running the prison.”
“That’s how they look at you,” Jay-Z said. “That’s exactly how they feel about you.”
So much of “4:44” is about the power and urgency of black economic self-sufficiency, and Jay-Z’s conversational asides only spotlighted it more intensely. But though it’s among his strongest work in the last decade, “4:44” hasn’t generated a true breakout hit. It is an album of warm, gentle gestures, not easily translatable to a large space.
The moments where he performed songs from the new album were the quietest here. These songs gain their power from close attention, not ecstatic release, and would benefit from a more intimate setting. (This show did not appear to be sold out, with many seats in the upper level empty throughout the night. Also, on Friday, a concert scheduled for early November in Fresno was canceled; The Fresno Bee speculated it was because of slow ticket sales.) “Moonlight” and “Caught Their Eyes” were unbalanced and muddy, and much of the detail of “Marcy Me” felt flattened.
Often in the past, Jay-Z would end his concerts with an extended musical outro during which he scanned the crowd and shouted out individual fans. It was a way to make an impossibly grand night feel small.
Here, he achieved that effect, though perhaps inadvertently, by different means. He closed his set with “Smile,” one of the most serene productions on his new album. “No drums! No drums!” he told his band, as he began rapping. The mood was mellow, the room was decelerating.
After the first verse, Jay-Z looked around and snickered, “I have no idea how to get off this stage.”
After a few seconds, he sorted it out, descending into one of the pits, but decided to stand there and rap for a moment. Then he walked out of the pit and into the crowd, rapping all the way to the exit as hundreds thronged around him.
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