Jay-Z’s Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Featured Barack Obama, Dave Chappelle, Beyoncé, LeBron, Blue, and More
Jay-Z was welcomed to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on Saturday night, and his portion of the ceremony featured touching induction speeches by Dave Chappelle and President Barack Obama, plus an introductory montage of a beyond-stacked bench of artists, actors, and highly notable fans running through his lyrics.
The roll call of people reciting classic Hov bars included Beyoncé, Blue Ivy Carter, Rihanna, LeBron James, Pharrell, Diddy, Chris Rock, Samuel L. Jackson, Halle Berry, David Letterman, Rick Ross, Questlove, Regina King, Lin-Manuel Miranda, John Legend, Common, H.E.R., Jamie Foxx, DJ Khaled, Lena Waithe, Aziz Ansari, Trevor Noah, Usher, Ed Sheeran, Tyler Perry, and Chris Martin.
After opening with a joke that he needed to apologize for something first and foremost—and an “I’m just fucking with you”—Chappelle, 48, went into his fandom for Hov, 51. “I could sit up here tonight, I could talk about his acumen as businessman. I could talk about his accomplishments in music. But I think what’s most important for everyone in this room to know is what it means to us, what he means to his culture,” the comedian said in an extensive speech transcribed in full at Rolling Stone.
On his way to a closer that went, “I am honored to be the n***a that gets to say, ‘My n***a, welcome to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame,” the comic who recently delivered the controversial The Closer for Netflix shared a perfect Jay anecdote:
“And as they’re taking the picture Jay says to me, ‘You must have a lot of pressure on you to say funny shit all the time.’ And I look at Jay and say to him, ‘Well you must have a lot of pressure on you to say cool shit all the time.’ And Jay looked at me and said, ‘It ain’t no pressure. I just do it.’ And I looked at Jay and said, ‘My God, man you just did it again.’”
In his acceptance speech, Jay-Z joked that everyone offering the effusive praise was “trying to make me cry in front of all these white people” and paid specific respects to his mother Dr. Gloria Carter, hip-hop pioneers KRS-One, Chuck D, Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, Chaka Pilgrim, Biggs Burke, and more. Cleveland.com, which noted Hov “gave the longest speech of the night, quoted him saying:
“Growing up, we didn’t think we could be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.’ We were told that hip-hop was a fad. And much like punk rock, it gave us this anti-culture [sentiment] and it was a subgenre. And there were heroes in it...Rakim and Big Daddy Kane and KRS-One and Chuck D and of course fellow inductee LL Cool J. I would watch these guys and they had big rope chains and they wore leather...Whatever they wore everybody would wear the next day. And I was like that’s what I want to do.”
Addressing Damon Dash, per HotNewHipHop, Jay said, “Shout out to Dame [Dash]; I know we don’t see eye to eye, but I can never erase your accomplishments, and I appreciate you and thank you for that. And shout out to [Kareem] ‘Biggs’ [Burke]; he’s one of the most honorable people I’ve ever met. We created something that will probably never be duplicated.”
Wrapping up, Jigga said he couldn’t see the future, but, “In fact, I do know what’s next, I gotta go to court Monday, it’s really embarrassing.”
Take a look at clips of the montage, Chappelle and President Obama’s remarks, and Jay-Z’s own Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction acceptance speech below.
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