Jay-Z almost ‘walked away’ from ‘The Blueprint.’ 25 years later, its healing power still resonates.
TheGrio...
25-years later, Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint” offered Black New York the same relief the album gave a broken city in 2001.
Jay-Z’s three-night run at Yankee Stadium had everybody talking. And sure, the clips have been all over the timeline, but this was one of those “you had to be there” moments. The magnitude of those shows, or really the energy of them, can’t be translated into a 30-second video.
On night two, celebrating 25 years of “The Blueprint,” HOV paused to reflect on the widely revered album and his complicated history with it. Because back on September 11, 2001, before the date was forever seared into the nation’s memory, the Brooklyn rapper released his sixth album into the world
“This album dropped on a real tragic time for New York City and I was prepared to walk away from this album obviously given everything that was going,” he told the crowd during the show on July 11. A reality that the rapper has not been afraid of acknowledging through the years, particularly through his 9/11 freestyle released 3 days after the album’s release.
And 25 years later, HOV honored the album’s history with subtle but poignant details like starting the Saturday show at 9:11 PM and opening with the commemorative freestyle.
He continued: “The way it resonated with the world, it was like part of healing for New York City, and when the numbers came back for the first week, I was blown away by the support and the love, and I was happy to hopefully provide some relief for such a tough time.”
Now, I was admittedly a youngin when “The Blueprint” first dropped, so I can’t speak to the album’s impact at the time. However, 25 years later, there was something cathartic about witnessing fans across generations exude the same level of excitement hearing the beat drop for tracks like “Heart of the City.” As Jay-Z spoke about the relief the album brought to a grieving city in 2001, I couldn’t stop thinking about how the timing this anniversary arrived carrying that same weight.
On a local level, a community of New Yorkers was grieving basketball player Kinu Rochford, whose career began in the streets of Brooklyn before ultimately playing in the pros internationally, who was killed during a basketball tournament on July 10. And on a national level, Black communities across the country are grieving and grappling with the growing number of headlines about the deaths of young Black boys like Nolan Wells, Xavier Washington, Tyrin Johnson and , and, unfortunately, too many more.
So that evening, I founding myself turning away front he stage and watching the small interaction within the crowd, specifically between the Black men in it. From the laughter between two friends attending the concert together to a stranger old enough to be my uncle and another young enough to be my homeboy, standing rows apart but somehow in sync, rapping every word like Jay-Z was singing backup for them.
@laforlico #jayz30 ♬ original sound – laforlico
And that’s the beautiful thing about music: it can give you a space to release the feelings you may be carrying. Whether HOV’s rhymes carried you through tough times or brought back fond memories, a stadium full of people agreed that for a few hours, they would let it all go to yell “Song Cry” at the top of their lungs and the music do what music does.
For the generation that learned “The Blueprint” in middle school hallways, and the one that inherited it from car rides with a favorite uncle or older cousin, that’s what moved through Yankee Stadium every single night. Not just nostalgia and reverence, but also relief. The kind that reaches back to what the album gave a broken city in 2001 and hands it to a community that needs it all over again.
Which is what makes Jay’s confession that he almost walked away from all of this, so sobering, because standing in that stadium, it’s impossible to imagine what we’d have lost if he had.