Jay-Z and Kanye West: We own the throne, we still want it
Kanye West, left, and Jay-Z at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday/ Richard Lautens
By Ben Rayner
It’s hard to believe, after bearing the full, two-and-a-half hour brunt of Jay-Z and Kanye West’sWatch the Throne tour stop at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday night, that there was a time when hip-hop shows were almost presupposed to suck.
The headliner would show up a couple of hours late (if he showed up at all), drop a few distracted verses from truncated versions of the hits over a crappy P.A. and then wander offstage after 20 or 30 minutes to appreciative, if mildly dissatisfied, applause because, well, everybody was just happy that the performer they’d paid to see on the night had indeed made it out to the gig.
Jigga and Kanye showed up a bit late to the first of their two consecutive ACC dates on Wednesday, taking the stage – or stages, rather, since they both first appeared to the strains of the combative duet “H*A*M” at opposite ends of the arena bowl rising atop a pair of LED-lit cubes emblazoned (of course) with video images of snarling rottweilers and predatory sharks – just enough behind schedule to ensure that the dense Watch the Throne program would be blowing through the venue’s typical 11 p.m. curfew by at least an hour. But when Jay-Z and Kanye West blow through a venue curfew, man, they really blow through it. This show, taking in most of this past August’s commendably hungry tag-team album Watch the Throne along with a choice sampling of greatest hits from both MCs’ deep solo catalogues, didn’t give you a second to breathe. It went flat out, from start to finish, in a relentlessly crowd-pleasing manner that put every single other big-ticket gig I’ve seen at the Air Canada Centre this year to shame. For reals, yo. That room was on its feet, punching the sky and loudly matching Jay and Kanye, verse for verse, for the duration.
Matching them as much as, y’know, one 20,000-strong mob’s collective “flow” will allow, anyway. You didn’t hear a massive gang chant in unison with Jay-Z’s tongue-twisting a capella tip of the hat to the late Pimp C during “Big Pimpin’” or anything, and the only time I saw anyone around me actually stop rhyming along and sit down and/or make for the washrooms in any great numbers throughout the whole, marathon performance was when West went a touch too long with the “emo” and the AutoTuned bleating during the mid-set indulgences “Runaway” and “Heartless.” On the whole, though, this was an up-for-it audience and a pair of superstars bringin’ it hard in kind. You’d have thought the energy would have tailed off between early collaborative killers such as “Who Gon’ Stop Me” and “Welcome to the Jungle,” a whack of smartly placed solo showstoppers – Jay’s “Nigga What, Nigga Who?,” “Hard Knock Life” and “Empire State of Mind,” for instance, or Kanye’s “Stronger,” “Jesus Walks” and “Monster” – and a boffo towards-the-encore end run that had the pair sharing the stage for an explosive one-two attack on “Gold Digger” and “99 Problems,” but it only kept compounding. By the end of it, “No Church in the Wild” came crushing forth from the sound system like a slow-motion version of some hardcore-techno track Dave Clarke would have dropped at the end of a DJ set 10 years ago and “Niggas in Paris” detonated so ferociously that it seemed perfectly sensible to simply reprise it a couple of times to keep the party going.
Neither Jay-Z nor Kanye West needs to give it up this much right now. They’re not watching the popular hip-hop throne, they own it and they know it. Good on ‘em both, then, for giving us some inarguable proof that they still want it and are willing to work for it, too.
Reprinted from toronto.com
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