A Review of A Concert Night With US Artistes Nas & Nelly

Hey hey hey. My people out there, how y'all doing today. I Hope the weekend was eventful as mine turned out to be. Mine started friday night- the Nas/Nelly concert -which turned out to be the best concert for me this year (not that I've been to that many).

Got to the Polo Club before 12am, and there was a very long queue from the gate venue....20 minutes later after getting tickets was in. Passed through two body checks and a metal detector and a few minutes after getting into the concert ground, Nas comes on stage.....and the reality set in -the albums we've listened to from way back on walkmans, discmans and now ipods. The album covers, the songs learnt by heart, the videos,the lyrics,the beef. The King of New York, Nasty Nas, Nasir Jones, Nastradamus steps unto the stage....man it was electrifying. 

I mean when Nas was introduced and he got on stage, it was truly phenomenal. Everyone virtually went haywire.  He introduced his DJ, DJ Green Lantern (man this dude was something else) and then the show started...

Nas was so fresh, wore a black Tee, he started out by saying how happy he was to be in the country- for the very first time, and he said he was loving it...He said he was going to take us all back to the beginning to his first album, he did hit tracks from illmatic album till date, and he held the stage spellbound for almost 2 hours..song after song after song.

I had to rush to the front though to see if I could get some photos-all I got was blurred photos cause everyone too was trying to get a good shot-and then my battery went flat-I thought the thing was charged apparently it wasn't. )-: 

After that I just tried to enjoy the performance of songs like ....Halftime

Life's a Bi#ch,It aint hard to tell,  NY State of Mind( he actually called it Lagos state of mind at one point), Street dreams, If I rule the world, Hate me now, you wont see me tonight,I want to talk to you,and so on. 

His last performance was significant -One Mic.

In between songs, he paused a little and spoke words of wisdom-for example at one point he said

my struggle is your struggle, my people are being oppressed back in the states,we are both being oppressed, Nigeria has oil, money, let us clean up Nigeria, stop the oppression

.. to loud shouts of approval from the crowd...

Also at one point he also mentioned change and Obama-saying a black man is the president of the United States, and afterwards did his rendition of "I Can" and the crowd just sang along...

He also R.I.P'd James Brown

All in all the show was great, Nas ended with One Mic and it was friggin beautiful man...he told everyone to put a finger in the air and at one point he knelt down on stage, and was whispering the lyrics-which was still audible...he used his hand to cover his face(tears?), and it was too deep to describe....there were shouts in the air calling his name and i must say Nas didn't disappoint....

Before he left, he kept saying that it wasn't going to be his last time here, that he'd surely be back soon....and the crowd just loved that.

Next came Nelly & The St Lunatics Crew....by then i was already thirsty from all the shouting and sing along's, so had to go get something to drink....

Nelly's performance wasn't as explosive as Nas', even though he brought his whole St. Lunatics Crew-Murphy Lee inclusive.. I just have really never been that much of a Nelly fan i must confess. So when he got on stage, all i waited to hear was "country grammar", the song that propelled him to a grammy award years back...

Nelly wore an Obama T-shirt (what's with Obama tonight?). 

He introduced himself and his crew. I think his first song was country grammar, can't really remember though. 

Later into the performance, he picked three ladies from the crowd, told them to come on stage to perform with him... they were gushing and obviously transfixed by it all. One of them did a sing along with him for the song "dilemma", and she was pretty ok i must say as we watched from the crowd the twin gigantic screens displaying it all... 

After his performance of tracks such as "country grammar", "dilemma", "Shake your tail feather", "Hot in ere", etc, a member of his crew starts throwing freebies in the form of CD's..

All in all, Nas stole the show that night.