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RU - Nas live at the Forum

Nas performing Illmatic in its entirety? That’s a gig that anyone with even a passing interest in rap would be crazy to turn down. As such, a cynical curmudgeon such as myself managed to drag my ageing carcass off the floor and venture out of ‘the dungeons of rap’ after an appropriately booze-filled Saturday night – once I’d restored my blood alcohol levels to an acceptable degree courtesy of some vodka my old mate O.S.B. was holding, natch. As is my wont on the Sunday night preceding a public holiday, the streets were already overflowing with drunken morons, and we’d just witnessed some young gun get shackled up by ‘the beast’ (aka the toy Protective Services characters who now litter our train stations like stray dogs looking for a piece of rancid meat) for allegedly throwing a cigarette at them.

Mr. Jones kindly hit the stage only ten minutes after he was scheduled, which is a cot-damn miracle in terms of rapper time. Joined by DJ Green Lantern, the guy who used to work with Eminem before that unfortunate phone call to Jadakiss, Nasir hit the stage to the block-rocking beat that is ‘NY State of Mind’, which still manages to leave me froze like ‘heron’ in the nose after all these years.

Running through the nine-song tracklist sequentially, it could be argued that no DJ was really required, since he could have easily just pressed play a CD, but Green did provide some helpful back-ups and beat changes as the show went on, such as flipping the track halfway through the always impressive ‘Halftime’ and ‘One Love’. Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ predictably opened up ‘It Ain’t Hard To Tell’, but sadly there was no sign of the speaker-smashing Large Professor remix instrumental for the last verse. It was also painfully apparent that only seven people in the venue knew the words to ‘Memory Lane’ and ‘One Time 4 Your Mind’, as the group karaoke session markedly quietened down for those two tracks. Nas engaged in minimal banter with the audience, which was a blessing, save for an amusing incident where an eager fan tossed a skinny joint on stage and Nas mocked it for being too small for him to smoke properly. He also asked if anyone had a copy of his debut on cassette tape, which only served to remind the more senior members of the audience just how old we really are.

Once he’d run through the album, I was thinking to myself that everything had run pretty smoothly thus far and was pleasantly surprised with how much I’d enjoyed the show. Being that there was still twenty minutes to kill in the hour-long set, however, meant we were then subjected to a showcase of post-Illmatic singles. Ruh-roh! On one hand, this meant that we’d get to see Nas rock ‘Made You Look’ and ‘Nas Is Like’. Less welcome were renditions of the Sesame Street Rap of ‘I Can’, the MS Paint flame graphics that accompanied ‘Hate Me Now’ (no sign of the footage of Puffy nailed to the cross that led to Mr. Combs bludgeoning Nas’ manager with a bottle of Cristal, then?) and the tiresome self-indulgence that is ‘One Mic’. Still, it could have been worse – there was thankfully no sign of ‘Oochie Wally,’ ‘You Owe Me’ or ‘Hip-Hop Is Dead’, and he only asked the crowd to put their hands in the air to prove their love for ‘real hip-hop’ once.

Nas left the stage once his hour was up, which was fine by me since encores are largely trite excursions into songs that weren’t good enough to include in the main set anyway. Plus it had been 60 minutes since he’d been able to spark a blunt, which must seem like an eternity once your buzz starts to wear off.  I also appreciated the fact that he didn’t bring any hype men / weed carriers along to wave those tiny white towels around while pacing back and forth on stage and rapping half of his lines. (That’s what the audience is for, apparently.) As much as it irks my hateful nature to admit this, the whole experience was remarkably painless and made for a show which CRC idol Larry David might describe as “prett-ay, prett-ay, prett-ay good.”

Keep up with Robbie’s weekly ‘No Country for Old (Rap) Men’ here.