The credit crunch has hit hip-hop. The first British leg of the four-year-old US festival series Rock the Bells has been reduced from three gigs to one, and what had previously seemed a curiously unambitious booking - tonight's headliner, Nas, sold out his last London gig 18 months ago at a venue twice the size - now seems prescient.
Yet the artists' back-to-basics approach and fiery belief in undiluted hip-hop suggests a music that will weather the harshest economic storms. This is not a lineup of arrivistes with a couple of radio hits. The freestyle champion Supernatural dazzles by improvising about objects handed to him by fans as he raps, while EPMD offer no-frills selections of studiously sloppy, cavernously subterranean classics. A reunited Pharcyde swagger through Ya Mama, the urtext of hip-hop as jocular insult, and deliver half of Bobby Brown's My Prerogative, complete with synchronised dance moves.
But it's Nas who really brings the feelgood factor. The New Yorker is still celebrating Barack Obama's victory, and has a spring in his step. His outstanding ninth album - released this year without a title after retailers balked at stocking a record called Nigger - dared to dream of the demise of the neocons. Nas pirouettes, bobs like a prizefighter, and gets a willing crowd to sing along to Black President's once anxious, now celebratory chorus ("Yes we can change the world"). He gleefully wrenches the 14-year-old line "I'm out for presidents to represent me" into an ebullient new context.
