Rakim Shows He Still Has It With Very Raw & Impressive New Tiny Desk Concert Performance

Rakim performs a Tiny Desk Concert on June 19, 2018.

Even at 50-years-old, the God MC, Rakim, still has it.  Which he very much proves on his new very raw and impressively stunning new Tiny Desk Concert Performance, which NPR Music first premiered yesterday.  Seeing Rakim as the latest in the ever-growing great concert series, which has seen the likes of rising stars Jorja Smith and Khalid, as well as fellow legend, GZA perform for Tiny Desk in just the past couple of weeks.  He performed his latest single and first in nearly a decade, King’s Paradise, which was released on Friday and is the theme song for the newest season of Marvel’s Luke Cage, which premiered on Netflix that same day.  The track itself wasn’t new to select NPR staff, who heard it days earlier when Rakim performed it for the first time.  The New York and Hip-Hop icon wasn’t the only icon or legend in the building either, as A Tribe Called Quest producer and DJ, Ali Shaheed Muhammad and keyboardist Adrian Younge, who produced and co-wrote the song under their new project moniker, The Midnight Hour, joined.  Younge playing bass and rising blues torchbearer Christone “Kingfish” Ingram sitting in on guitar with a few more also sitting in for a full 9-man backing band led by Younge for the performance.  One that seen them help Rakim also deliver his timeless classics, Paid In Full and Know the Ledge, for a very stunningly spectacular and amazing performance, which may have been one of the best in Tiny Desk’s so far already amazing history.