Jay-Z, Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, June 28th
Jay-Z was in jaw-dropping form at Glastonbury
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Wednesday, 02, Jul 2008 11:12
"If it ain't broke don't fix it. If you start to break it then people aren't going to go. I'm sorry, but Jay-Z? No chance.
"Glastonbury has a tradition of guitar music and even when they throw the odd curve ball in on a Sunday night you go 'Kylie Minogue?' I don't know about it. But I'm not having hip-hop at Glastonbury. It's wrong".
While these words might have seemed throwaway comments from Noel Gallagher, a musician never known to be backward in coming forward with his famed Burnage 'wit', they ended up igniting a debate that stretched from April to late June, with the raft of questions over the reaction to the Roc-A-Fella star's appointment to the Pyramid Stage even concerning institutionalised racism.
In the end, after Jay Z provided what was probably the greatest Glastonbury performance of the 21st century, two matters were certain - things had changed for the better and Noel proved himself less relevant than ever.
Don't get me wrong, even as a fan of Hova, I'd been nervous about the show, wondering if it would fall prey to the typical traps of live hip-hop, with lyrics lost thanks to the babble of backup MCs, fearful that Jay-Z would ignore the same bottling experienced by 50 Cent at Reading and overwhelmingly anxious that Noel might just have been right and Glastonbury just wasn't ready for hip-hop.
I've never been happier to be wrong and I've probably never been proved wrong quicker. The Jigga Man's entrance was preceded by a dizzying mash-up of Noel's comments and pop culture imagery, stressing shame on our reservations over the greatest rapper of all time headlining the best festival ever, before the unmistakable opening chords of Wonderwall rang out across the field and Jay appeared to sing along with 100,000 people. Talk about a dignified response, this was somehow both the ultimate diss but a showing of props - to use the vernacular - of immense maturity and without resorting to the tired machismo that dogs much of rap.
And as the mammoth beat of 99 Problems - set to dent the UK top 30 this weekend - entered, and a mass of once sceptical people bounced like at a Brixton rave, you couldn't deny that rather than 'breaking' Glastonbury as Noel had alleged, Jay-Z had just added a stellar string to the festival's already burgeoning bow.
The guest spots we'd been 'promised' - Chris Martin, Beyonce, even Kanye West - never materialised, but it never mattered. Tim Westwood revealed Jay-Z had pledged to "win it on his own" and never was a victory more triumphant, with a sea of hands forming the Roc-A-Fella diamond over the Brooklyn Boy's biggest hits, snippets of American Boy and Rehab slipped in and the most unlikely sound of the entire weekend as the entire field sang along to Umbrella.
Lupe Fiasco, a protege of Jigga's, had found his muddled political calls to arms falling on deaf ears on the Friday on the Jazz World stage, but when Jay freestyled a rap while a picture of the current White House incumbent hung behind, his climactic cry of "f***k Bush" before professing to "change it up" as the image morphed to that of Barack Obama elicited a spine-tingling cheer and it felt just a little like witnessing history.
2001's Heart of the City was meshed thrillingly with U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday and while Linkin Park might not have taken to the stage for the Numb/Encore mashup, it couldn't have seemed less important, so comprehensively had Hova won over the doubters, reaffirmed the devotion of the faithful and - as he stressed "this was important for my culture" - changed something very profound in British music.
"For those who didn't get the memo, my name's Jay-Z and I'm pretty f*****g awesome," he assured us - never was a truer word spoke.
Lewis Bazley