Nas and Damian “Junior Gong” Marley at First Avenue
You think your job is tough? How’d you like to wave a Jamaican flag above your head for two solid hours every night? A great workout, sure, offering its share of public adulation. Still, it was hard not to feel some sympathy for the standard-bearer whose perpetual motion accompanied Nas and Damian “Junior Gong” Marley on stage at First Avenue last night (or at least for his wrists). Granted, the two backup singers, whose dance moves ran from frantic rump-shakin’ to spurts of martial arts fury, rivaled him for energy—as did the two performers themselves.
Nas and Marley shared the stage easily (hardly a given when two solo stars collaborate) and proved good visual foils to one another. Marley, with dreads snaking below his knees and his inherited aristocratic bearing, made for a stately yet compassionate foe of Babylon. Head-shaven and hunched for action, Nas rhymed with a righteous intensity that made it hard to recall what a disappointment he’d seemed a mere decade ago. Their set relied heavily, as expected, on their recent album, Distant Relatives, with tracks that typically settle into a pattern: Marley chanting exhortatory choruses and Nas challenging with grimy, everyday details.
Each allotted himself a solo turn as well, with Marley’s set peaking predictably when sampling his dad’s “Exodus” and on his own gritty hit “Welcome To Jamrock.” Nas’ song choices were sometimes questionable (does anyone have fond memories of “Hate Me Now”?) but offered a sharp career overview, dropping a bit of “Represent” from his classic Illmatic, bolstering “Made You Look” with hot interplay between DJ Green Lantern and live musicians, and raging through the anti-pop “Hip Hop Is Dead.” The duo’s encore began with “As We Enter,” the hypest cut on Distant Relatives, continued with a stripped-down “One Mic” that featured an African drum, and closed, as it must, with a tribute to Damian’s dad: “Could You Be Loved.”
