NAS in Concert - Sydney 2009

Just 2 days after the Wu Tang Clan came thru and smashed it up at the Enmore it was time for round 2 featuring God Son himself Nasir Jones. Having seen him the previous year opening for Kanye I thought it would be interesting to see how he held down the headliner spot. By all accounts Chali 2na, Qbert and Super Nat tore it up during their opening sets but I arrived just in time to see 2na Fish walking off stage. Damn.

Once again Nas hit the stage with a band backing him up. Which got me thinking. What’s up with hip hop cats and their live backing bands these days? Do they somehow feel it authenticates themselves to the hip hop haters out there that don’t consider hip hop real music? Does it disguise an otherwise boring performance by having the crowd distracted by mad guitarists running around stage? It’s already bad enough that DJ’s have been relegated to playing MP3s and mixing in Final Scratch but now they’re being getting pushed off stage by these upstarts trying to bring the liveness back to hip hop! Hmmmm.

Back to the show. Nas attacked the stage rushing out to ‘Hip Hop Is Dead’ (Sorry I prefer ‘Thiefs Theme’) and the crowd went wild. Guess that’s a given. What followed was an hour of solid hip hop with the crowd relishing every minute of the Queensbridge legends wordplay and energy. The Illmatic medley was brilliant if somewhat a bit of a tease as he ran thru a verse and hook off the majority of his original hip hop classic. How good is it to hear those Primo drums on ‘NY State of Mind’? He needs to do a show like Jay-Z did and perform the whole album in its entirety.

Tracks like ‘Street Dreams’ and ‘If I Ruled the World got the crowd excited but always reminded me of Nas’ bling era Escobar phase so never really did anything for me. ‘I Can’ was another crowd favourite while Nas even had time to do a little MJ tribute as he did ‘It Aint Hard to Tell’. ‘Nas is Like’ was awesome as was ‘Made You Look’ and was close to hip hop perfection in my books.

Nas really brought his A-Game and the crowd reciprocated giving him mad props. Only disappointment is he didn’t do ‘Ether’ but I guess that’s never gonna happen.

All in all a dope hip hop night out and what made it even better was the All Blacks won!

- Review by Jason Jaram.