Drinks, not birds that is, in Baltimore bartending nights, riding ‘round the DMV as a Guinness sales rep by day. I was serving ‘em in the home of the Terrapins. He then headlined a Def Jam arena tour along with the late-great DMX shortly after, immortalized in a feature film some of us bought tickets to see in theaters during Fall 2000. Back when they did matter, and successful recording artists could actually get off selling records, the Jiggaman sold four million copies of Vol. That’s nothing you could prove in arbitrary measurements like record sales, but nobody knows what those are anymore anyway. In terms of profile, Jay-Z is bigger now than he was then, especially in terms of being known to those outside of rap culture across multiple generations. Was he promoting on the low, or did he already know? I think it was very important to him to add another notch on his bedpost to show different sides of his music.' He wanted to show himself in a serious light, in a respectable light. In Fall ’01, before anyone witnessed Jigga rock with The Roots, Questlove was teasing out thoughts to MTV News, 'People have this preconceived image of Jay-Z: 'What was it like working with a jiggy rapper?' Usually, I work with some artist and they're like, 'Yo, it has to be the way it is on the album.' He wanted to experiment.

That line from the God MC always sounded like some fly-if-you-buy bullshit to me.īut with Jay as an arbiter of cool, with a BIG strain of rap nerd beneath, while trying to straddle an invisible fence between commoners and Common listeners who thought they were special on Unplugged, Hov found proper assistance to finesse that line of bullshit into sounding something like common sense. “ Truthfully,” I never believed Jay-Z would, then or now, “ rather be Talib Kweli.” “ Is it too early to mourn, is it too late to ride?” The rap game’s then-leader who’d go on to father three with the lead singer from Destiny’s Child knows a thing or two about fate or time. Has it really been twenty damn years since this moment?Īn event reinforcing (pun intended) the takeover of The Blueprint (2001), an NYC album that went on to accidentally define the entire world for a period of time.ĭropping during the height of Jay-Z’s “artistic” prime, on the same day the Twin Towers did, ushering in decades of wartime. For those getting grown around the time, this live performance first aired on a cable channel still then featuring a somewhat reasonable amount of music in its television, this is a time-capsule catapulting you back into that Fall ‘01 vortex.

Jay z unplugged stream