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Steven J. Horowitz
Senior Music Writer
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Getty Images As it turned out, Jay-Z had been quietly setting the stage over the past few months for what we could expect during his headlining show at the Roots Picnic in Philadelphia. On streaming, he’d changed his name from Jay-Z to its original spelling, JAŸ-Z, perhaps a wink and a nod that it would be a tried-and-true career retrospective. Then, he started digitizing his singles catalog, releasing studio versions of classic tracks along with their radio edits — a subtle reminder that, amid all the headlines that have dogged him over the past few years, those songs have shelf lives that stretch back to the deep recesses of the 1990s, and formed the backbone of a career that’s been built piece by piece across the bookends of two millennia.
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