Photo: Mike Barry / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Jay-Z closed out his yearlong “Jay-Z 30” concert series Saturday night at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California — and he brought the West Coast with him.

The 25-time Grammy winner’s final show of the run featured surprise guests Too Short, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, who turned the stadium into a West Coast celebration with “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” “The Next Episode,” “California Love” and “Still D.R.E.” — a song Jay-Z himself wrote.

Jay-Z took the stage around 9:25 p.m. and ran through roughly 90 minutes of career-spanning hits, from “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” and “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” to “Empire State of Mind” and “Encore.” Too Short brought Oakland into the mix with “Blow the Whistle,” and the night also wove in tributes to the late Nipsey Hussle.

As the finale closed with “Encore,” Jay-Z had a message for the crowd — aimed squarely at social media chatter claiming the stadium wasn’t full or that tickets had been given away.

“You gotta be very aware of what’s going on in the world. People will tell you that nobody was in here tonight, but you got eyes. You can see. People will tell you that the music wasn’t great, but you got ears. You gotta understand. You gotta question everything,” he said.

“This world with AI and everything, it’s been going on forever. They called it propaganda before. But now, the technology has caught up and people are tricked. A lot of tricknology for us… Make sure you question everything you feel.”

The “Jay-Z 30” series marked 30 years since his debut album “Reasonable Doubt,” released June 25, 1996. The run began with a headlining set at the Roots Picnic in late May and concluded with two nights at SoFi Stadium — the same building where Dre and Snoop headlined the Super Bowl LVI halftime show in 2022, a show Jay-Z’s Roc Nation produced.

For hip-hop fans who grew up on these records — in Toledo and everywhere else — Saturday night was a reminder of why the catalog endures: three decades in, the songs still fill stadiums, and the artists who made them still command the stage together.

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