This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free. In 2008, when Washington Wizards guard Deshawn Stevenson called LeBron James overrated, Jay-Z intervened on LeBron’s behalf with “Blow the Whistle,” a loose, low-stakes freestyle over Bay Area legend Too Short’s instant classic of the same name.
The track is all about being too big to respond to petty swipes. The most enduring line goes: “We let the money do the talkin—as you can see, we be talkin rather often.” Fitting, then, that Jay opened his concert on Saturday night—the second of back-to-back shows at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium—with “Blow the Whistle.” In the midst of similar noise, he let the music do the talking. The pair of shows marked the finale of Jay’s year-long Jay-Z30 project, celebrating the 30th anniversary of his debut album with a trio of sold-out concerts at Yankee Stadium this past summer and subsequent dates across London and Paris.
Incidentally, the grand finale arrived at a moment when Jay is at the center of not one but two divisive debates. The first, currently raging on Rap Twitter and recently aggravated by 50 Cent, concerns his place in the rap canon (was he ever truly the undisputed “dominant” rapper in the game?) And then, with the announcement that he’s chosen himself to be the 2027 Super Bowl Halftime Show headliner, some are calling his relevance into question, or snidely remarking that he’ll need to lean heavily on his Rolodex to actually pull it off. Both debates are ridiculous and reductive.
So Jay used the occasion of two (more) sold-out stadium shows to prove why, running through a roughly 30-song setlist deftly curated with crowd-pleasers, B-Side gems(“The Watcher 2”!!), and hit singles—just him, a 10-piece band, and the occasional light show. Across both shows, there were only four guest moments: the aforementioned Short Dawg, John Legend & DJ Khaled for “God Did,” Scarface for what may have been the first-ever performance of their heralded collab “This Can’t Be Life,” and an extended medley from Dr. All were sparing, intentional and worked in service of the overarching theme celebrating Jay’s lore. (After all, he did write “Still D.R.E.” Imagine if he came out with them to essentially perform his reference track.) Jay’s fixation on his naysayers felt especially pointed, sometimes to a fault.
While “God Did” is great, it made for an awkward encore on night one, though the stamina flex to do a three-minute verse right after doing a two-hour set was admirable. The obsession with tour cameos in general has gotten a little out of hand. Sure, it’s fun as hell when performers show off how deep their collaborative bag is and how influential their reach is—like, say, night two of Kanye’s Chicago homecoming or night three of Jay in Yankee Stadium.
But reinforcing that you can move the crowd by yourself—without even the help of a backing track—is a flex of equal, if not greater, import. Having hits is paramount, but at what point is the effect diluted if you’re just having the track play and letting the audience do most of the work? Exhibiting athletic breath control, Jay tore through one anthem after another, from the lyrical gymnastics of “Hovi Baby” to a track that invites audience participation like “Beach Is Better”—or a song that requires both, like “N-gga What, N-gga Who,” breaking occasionally just to change fits.
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