“About ten of us are bullshitting in a hallway backstage when the door to the dressing room marked simply “Hov” opens and Jay-Z walks out. He’s wearing a Yankees snapback pulled way low. Like, Kanye, Jay also wears an extra-long black custom tee with stars around the neck and the initials JZ and KW in gothic font on the sleeves. He is gripping a glass of red wine. We can’t smell the wine, but the wine smells expensive. The whole hallway goes quiet and stares. He moves slowly and in silence—and his presence instantaneously sucks up all the oxygen in the room, all the noise. Nobody so much as breathes. Jay’s got a screwed up look on his face, like he’s disgusted by his own swagger, and like he’s about to kill a person. Or maybe 20,000 people—a whole audience. Everybody in the hallway knows Shawn Carter to one extent or another, but sometimes, like in this moment, they’re just fans like everyone else.”
This is a beautiful article.
