Happy 20th Anniversary to Jay-Z’s Unplugged, originally released December 18, 2001.
“Welcome to Jay-Z’s poetry reading.”
Welcome to New York City, with a rap legend at his apex, two months after 9/11.
Welcome to the First Hip-Hop Multiverse Meeting of the New Millennium.
Welcome to MTV Studios and the last great Unplugged album of consequence.
Welcome to Jiggaman’s extended evolution and campaign to be a Critical Darling.
Welcome to The Legendary Roots Crew, 2000 GRAMMY Award Winning and Every Y2K Rock
Critic’s Rap Pick Because “Hey-Look-They-Play-Instruments-Too!”, attempting to get their feet wet without floating face down in the mainstream.
Welcome to a fourth-quarter topic du jour on Social Media-Before-Social-Media, Seminal Contributor Prenatal-Black-Twitter, a.k.a. the Okayplayer message boards.
Welcome to the “flow of the century” and “most incredible Roots band with me.”
“Oh, it’s timeless.”
Do you remember the time?
Were any of you outside?
Time is a thief.
Jay-Z’s Unplugged is less an album, more a moment in time you revisit on repeat.
And when this time got stamped, it did so multiple times, with both feet.
Don’t get it twisted, it wasn’t all good just a week or twenty years ago.
There’s always been a war going on outside no man was safe from.
But while you walking with your head down scared to look, back in that day, it was gonna take more than just a bad gust from the idiot wind to get your life took.
“It was the winter…it was the cold winter.”
It was neither the best of times, nor the worst of times, in retrospect.
In a cold winter no need to keep yo shit in coatcheck.
I looked back ‘til my brain was fried to a fricassee.
Let me remember why we’re here…we talking about a particular era of God MC.
This was post-umlaut, J-A-Y hyphen, no-cap yet Jay-Z. Jigga.
Young Hov. Iceberg. H-to-The-Izzo-V-To-The-Izzay.
Post-Foxy.
Pre-Beyonce.
Reigning “Takeover” Jay, 72 hours before “Ether” drop day.
Che Guevera (tee) with bling on, pre-Complex.
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.
Has it really been twenty damn years since this moment?
An 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.
Dropping during the height of Jay-Z’s “artistic” prime, on the same day the Twin Towers did, ushering in decades of wartime. Too Soon? Too Late?
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.
“Is it too early to mourn, is it too late to ride?”
“Truthfully,” I never believed Jay-Z would, then or now, “rather be Talib Kweli.”
That line from the God MC always sounded like some fly-if-you-buy bullshit to me.
But 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.
Common sense ain’t common.
Not now.
Not then.
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. He wanted to show himself in a serious light, in a respectable light. I think it was very important to him to add another notch on his bedpost to show different sides of his music."
Was he promoting on the low, or did he already know?
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.
That’s nothing you could prove in arbitrary measurements like record sales, but nobody knows what those are anymore anyway. Back when they did matter, and successful recording artists could actually get off selling records, the Jiggaman sold four million copies of Vol. 2... Hard Knock Life in ’98. 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.
Where were you? Who, Me a.k.a. Yours Truly?
I was serving ‘em in the home of the Terrapins. Drinks, not birds that is, in Baltimore bartending nights, riding ‘round the DMV as a Guinness sales rep by day. Every 30-45 minutes, alone in an FM-radio-only company van, on any of the three “urban” stations between BMore and DC, you were gonna hear some Jay.
Was on 95 South headed to DC one fateful day when they said the pentagon got hit by a plane. Turned around at the next exit, but rather than stay glued to a TV in horror all day, got done making calls to check in with loved ones, then anxiety sent my restless ass to the record store to cop the new Bobby Dylan and Jay.
Copping that unlikely-to-some pair of releases was the only thing that day, besides working, that I’d been planning to do.
So, I’m guessing like a Brooklyn Rap Royal of multi-aliases said on “People Talkin”: “I speak thru music, I reach you dudes, we dig deeper in the dirt than cleat shoes.”
Or like a Minnesota-born, NYC-bred singer-songwriter turned Nobel Prize Winner, while in a 2020 jawn quoting 19th Century Camden, New Jersey’s absolute greatest recorded poet recently talk-sung, “I Contain Multitudes.”
The slated date of Jay-Z Unplugged’s commercial release, shortly after the show’s premiere airing on MTV, likely didn’t accidentally land on December 18th. What did that date 12/18 mean, you ask? Well…besides being the industry’s last chance at another stocking-stuffer for the holiday season, it “just-so-happened’ to be the same day Nas, on the heels of putting out “Ether,” his iconic diss track reply to Jay leaked three days after the Unplugged performance, planned to drop Stillmatic.
It all happened. That Nas comeback album became, like Blueprint three months before that, anointed a five-mic classic, back when such things still mattered. The hype (beast) is real. Rap fans were ready to see Nas get up off the map.
Never mind comparing Stillmatic to The Blueprint, which it didn’t, or “Takeover” vs “Ether” as a song, it isn’t…hearing Unplugged in 2021 makes me realize it’s even better than that perceived classic. Instead of @-ing me, you can go tell it on the mad-ass mountain of your old favorite message board if y’all still have static.
Speaking of message boards, one of the most influential, highly trafficked during this memorable moment in time began in Philadelphia. It was an inspired idea called Okayplayer.com, hatched by screenwriter/author Angela Nissell as an alternative suggestion for how her friend, Roots drummer Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, could better spend a record-company advance, rather than the Jeep he’d planned. For the first time, old and new debates about arcane concepts like “realness,” could be painstakingly articulated in a new setting: an online arena.
At the turn of the millennium, there had been a growing, palpable separation in hip-hop, between what its artists and fans viewed as mainstream and underground. By this time, that dividing line was more pronounced than any media-stoked East-Coast/West-Coast claptrap. Not in the sense of tangible danger in meeting a violent end, as we’d recently seen tragically happen in ‘96/’97 following a public dispute between two massively popular labels (Death Row & Bad Boy) in the wake of a fallout between friends (Pac & Big). Moreso, in terms of credibility inside circles of artists existing inside opposing camps.
Enter Hov, at the point where he was “big enough to do it.” Add in Questlove, a born-and-bred bandleader, whose first Radio City Music Hall performance came at 12 playing drums for his father’s doo-wop group, Lee Andrews & The Hearts.
Quest having since the mid-nineties been musical director of his own unit, a critically acclaimed rap outfit colloquially known as The Legendary Roots Crew.
That band was still a decade, plus countless lineup changes away, from their evolution into America’s Favorite House Band on NBC. Right then, The Roots were a hip-hop group, playing live instruments, for whom a task like this, they came uniquely and expertly equipped. Said Quest in ’01 of Jay-Z Unplugged, “Once the opportunity presented itself, we took advantage of it.”
Mission Accomplished. This album’s running time is listed as just shy of sixty minutes. Today it flies past your earholes at least twice as quick. Listening to Jay-Z Unplugged twenty years later, it’s nearly breathtaking in its coalescing of laser-sharp precision with one-off looseness, particularly for a first summit between the hottest rapper in the land plus a band from Philly he’d just met.
“Breathing is a Privilege.”
In a matter of a week or two, shortly after The Roots’ leg on the ’01 summer-shed Area: One Festival (alongside Nelly Furtado and OutKast) and Jay-Z’s Blueprint Lounge club/theater Fall tour ended, these two seemingly disparate acts formed like Voltron to cross-streams and proceed to do this. While Quest spoke then of seizing an opportunity, and Jay likely did indeed seek that previously elusive air of “respectability,” this union was not without risk.
I welcome today’s internet sleuthers-and-truthers to dig deep into the digital archives from Winter 2001 back to the 1-9-9-9. You’ll find all kinds of pre-hate shots fired, from behind many different gates. But keep in mind that is old-school vitriol, before most folks even knew the meaning of the word “troll.” Anonymous venom, howled out from internet cafes and computer labs, blasted out from DSL-corded computers at best before Zuck and Dem Boyz threw a healthy dose of #GTBW and capitalism into this mess, while finding the time to monopolize and monetize on yo pocket device that starts with “i.”
But let’s not get bogged down by the subsequent where’s, when’s, or why’s.
Any fan of Jay-Z, The Roots, one, or both, pretending they didn’t pull this off?
They Lie.
Some might quibble with the song selection, outside the contemporaneous Blueprint tracks.
You might even blame MTV for that. In the cases of “Can I Get A…”, “Big Pimpin,’” or in particular “Hard Knock Life,” those requests are public matters of fact. In 2001, this was still an uncharted platform for rap, outside of the packaged Tribe/Lyte/De La/LL episode from ten years back. Y2K Viacom were among the biggest pimps in the entertainment business, so you best believe they were gonna “request” a few smash hits.
On the flip side, that same Big Machine also put the wheels in motion for an occasion like this to even exist. And let’s be real, “Can I Get A…” cooks in this context. Jag coaxing an MTV crowd to mimic Annie kids on the “Hard Knock Life” chorus is adorable as shit. Those added strings, coupled with Quest plus then-new addition Knuckles on percussion, make that Egyptian sample Timbaland flipped on “Big Pimpin” ring out like crazy. And who else could hit that speed-rap blitzkreig-bop-bounce-inside-the-pocket rap of “Jigga What, Jigga Who?” like Jay to the Z?
“Flow With Me.”
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the guests adding to this eve’s prestigious memorability. Mary J. Blige’s “Can’t Knock The Hustle” duet, concluding on a coda where holleration can be heard all the way back in Yonkers while she’s in this dancerie, is the favorite cut on this album for many listeners, including me.
As a last banger to burn the house down before a non-televised encore, Pharrell’s faux-Curtis-Mayfield-croon plus natural synergy while working alongside both The Roots and Jay-Z provide the proper energy for Unplugged’s final chapter.
Last but not least, a toast to the criminally underrated Jaguar Wright. This night remains a reminder of how locked in Jaguar and The Roots were, during their all-too-brief shared period.
In addition, this show is also evidence of how Jag’s performance fearlessness, vocal capabilities, and palpable energy had a profound effect throughout on an obviously impressed Jay-Z. If Unplugged was a movie, Jag would be that new character actor who steals nearly every scene while onscreen.
The branches that grew, sparks that flew, from many of the artists here led to a lot of subsequently notable things: Quest would go on to be musical director of a feature film revolving around Jay-Z’s retirement party at Madison Square Garden, Fade To Black, in 2004.
Jay became President of Def Jam for just long enough to discover Rihanna, sign Nas and The Roots to the label, then duck right back out again, because when you’re a living legend MC blessed to exist in the twenty-first century, quitting “foreva-eva-foreva-eva?” is not really on the table. The Roots today star on The Tonight Show. Quest spins records on The Academy Awards. Jigga hosts Philadelphia’s largest annual summer festival, Made In America.
With that being said, when you next put this album on and you press play, you can make an argument that no one involved in this performance was ever better than they were right there, right then. That’s certainly no slight on any of the amazing folks present on Jay-Z Unplugged.
This would be a lofty perch very few high-flying birds get to sit upon for a “remember when?”
Listening again?
“I got lost for a second, I ain’t gonna lie. I was in my own thoughts for real.”
Rest In Peace to an original member of The Roots, plus the bass player on this legendary jam, Hub, a.k.a. “Leonard Hubbard on the bass, my mellow, my man.”
Salute to the memories of the late-great Greg Tate, Richard Nichols, and Malik B.
With Love & Peace,
Your Boy B-O-M-B
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