The Man Who Unearthed Jay-Z’s Summer Jam Footage Has a Vault Filled With Rap History

This month, long lost video footage of Jay-Z’s iconic 2001 Summer Jam performance went viral on Twitter.

For decades, the moment was steeped in apocrypha and mystery. Fans told stories about what happened during Jay-Z’s set (including a guest appearance from Michael Jackson) but aside from snippets of audio that didn’t tell the whole story, there was little documentation of the actual performance.

There were more questions than answers about what happened that day. What did Michael Jackson do onstage? Were any Roc-A-Fella soldiers onstage during “Takeover”? What gesture did Jay make when he infamously rapped, “Ask Nas, he don’t want with Hov!” We had zero indication of the performance outside of a crowd’s screams, and Jay-Z’s infamous stoicness after the performance. It was clear he had made history, but we had no idea what that epic moment looked like. Until now.

Thanks to rap archivist Claudio Abreu, the entire hour-long set was finally unearthed this month. And he doesn’t remember how he got the grainy footage in the first place. It was just another tape in a large vault of historic hip-hop footage that he’s been collecting for decades.

“My theory is that somebody who knew somebody came to my house and said, ‘Claudio, since you’re such a big Jay-Z fan, check this out,’” he tells Complex. In his recollection, someone showed him the tape shortly after the performance, and he was “not impressed” because of the video quality and the freshness of the moment. “It’s not old [at that point]. I don’t know that this is going to be a missing part of hip-hop yet.”

“For 21 years, when people talk about the Summer Jam screen, the image of me watching that video is what I see,” he says. “[I’m] not knowing that nobody else has an image in their head of the Summer Jam screen only in a very obscure angle.”

Abreu re-recorded the footage to a VHS cassette, put it in his tape collection, and didn’t think about it for 20 years. That is, until he started his HipHopVCR venture, where he’s uploading footage from his large vault of music videos, interviews, performances, and sitcom appearances from rappers onto YouTube and Instagram.

If a rapper was on TV between 1997 and 2005, there’s a good chance Abreu recorded it, and we’ll eventually see it on HipHopVCR. He has amassed a collection of old tapes with over 300 hours of footage on them, in addition to scans from print magazines that he uploads to his Instagram account.

Growing up, Abreu was consumed by a passion for hip-hop and basketball. He says he “literally collected every CD from every artist that had any level of notoriety,” sometimes after only hearing a single song. The first footage he collected was in the heat of the East Coast – West Coast rap drama in 1996, when he re-recorded over a tape with a movie on it. By 1997, he started buying blank tapes, and would program his VCR to record anytime he saw a commercial about an artist set to appear on television.

“I programmed my VCR, and I put a note on my TV that said, ‘Nobody touches the TV,’” Abreu recalls. “Then I would go about my life. When I came home, that footage had been recorded with commercials and everything, then I would re-record it without the commercials on my official tape. Then it was cataloged. I would erase that other tape and move on with my life.”

Back in the ‘90s, once a TV show or game came on, that could literally be the only time it ever aired. “I understood that what I was viewing was historic, but I didn’t know if it was going to happen again in history,” Abreu reflects. So he wanted to conserve the moments from the culture that he says “astounded” him.

As involved as his recording process became, he says he never let it intrude on his personal life. He had a job, a social life, and a home with multiple TVs, so he could record on a smaller TV and not affect his family’s viewing. Even though he had a little brother, he says rivalry never got in the way of his process. The recording of rap content and Michael Jordan games became so common in his household that his mother would actually inconvenience herself to allow him to do so.

“When Michael Jordan games came on, I would politely ask my mom, ‘Can you please go to your room so I can record the game here?’ And she would oblige,” he says. “She didn’t want to—she’d rather be in the living room at 7 p.m.—but I was so adamant and passionate about it, she’d let me do it.” He had to develop a system to keep track of his vast collection, which included labeling everything that’s on each tape.

“The channel wouldn’t be possible if I didn’t take the notes that I did back then,” he says. “For every hour, I would put an hour mark on that paper. That way, if I needed to find something, I could find it in the range.”

By 2005, Abreu’s recording habits slowed down. He had a child in 2003, moved in with his wife, and explains that his “first child and real responsibility started to slow down the recording process.” Once he got a computer in his home, he started consuming hip-hop content online instead of on TV, and his recording stopped.

“I just didn’t like the way the music was going,” he recalls. ”I was disinterested at that point. I think Jay-Z had retired, Nas wasn’t as active, and it was changing. I’m not a judgmental person when it comes to different eras of hip-hop. But even now, when I look back to 2005, it wasn’t really a good year for hip-hop. And I think that was it for me. I was like, ‘Hey, I’m done. That’s it.’”

Still, he kept his eight-year collection of 39 tapes. “They just stayed in my closet forever for a long time,” he says. “And then I decided one day that the box is taking up too much space and I decided to start the process of digitizing them.” Abreu transferred the tapes to CDs in 2012, but didn’t start uploading them to YouTube until the pandemic hit.

“I knew that it belonged in the universe and it doesn’t belong to me,” he says of his decision to put the recordings on the internet. “I wanted to give it to the universe. I didn’t even want to put logos on anything. If you look at my earlier videos, there’s no logos on my earlier videos. I had told my wife, ‘Hey, listen, I have this stuff. I think it’s important.’”

Abreu uploaded 10 videos on the first day and gained 20 subscribers. “This is what people want,” he immediately realized, so he kept going. The original plan was to dump 30 minutes of footage at a time, before realizing he needed to gradually organize the project, so he branded it with a logo, put together merch, and started learning video editing. Abreu is a professional photographer who runs multiple businesses, and he says HipHopVCR is a lot of work to maintain, but it’s worth it. Ultimately, he settled on a cadence of uploading a couple videos per day, rolled out by theme.

”I want to be very varied,” he says. “I want to be very sporadic.” For instance, he uploaded a hoard of Kanye West videos when Jeen-Yuhs dropped, including early 2000s footage of the rap icon telling 106 & Park, “I can do more than just make beats.” There are clips of ‘90s and 2000s stars like Kanye, Jay-Z, DMX, and Eminem on shows like MTV Diary, TRL, 106 & Park, Rap City, and Making The Video, as well as rarities like a clip from a UPN show investigating whether Tupac faked his death.

HipHopVCR is a time capsule of the pre-social media era, when 10-minute interviews and 30-minute shows were the only glimpses people would get of artists outside of concerts and music videos. If you missed the one live airing of Eminem’s awkward TRL interview, you were out of luck. There were no replays—until now. Archival projects like HipHopVCR are giving a reprisal to historic moments that older fans thought they’d never see again, and new fans are discovering for the first time.

“I think that people as a culture should be a little bit more responsible with [documenting and archiving],” he says. “I think that every moment is important. Not only did I document that part of my life, but there are other aspects of my life that I also recorded.” Abreu carried a camcorder everywhere, getting priceless footage of hanging out with his friends, going to the movies, and his kids’ first milestones. He jokes that his friends were annoyed back then, but now they get a kick out of seeing how much has changed. “It is all history,” he says of his documentation. “In this particular case, that’s my history. But I was also recording our history when I was recording all the hip-hop stuff.“

If Abreu sees anything online that interests him, he rips it and saves it offline, just in case the website hosting it ever disappears. “Do you have a video of what the internet looked like when you were 10?” he asks. “We’re tired of these marketing emails we get today. But wouldn’t you want to see what they look like 30 years from now? Forty years from now, maybe we’ll be doing this again because I’m still doing it. I haven’t stopped. And it’s only because I have a high interest in it. In many cultures around the world, it’s a vital part of a culture, is to catalog.”

Curiosity and appreciation for culture fuels HipHopVCR, and he has a vault of footage that we’ve only seen 35 percent of so far. Abreu says he hasn’t watched the footage in years, so he’s re-discovering things right along with us, including with the Jay-Z footage. “I’m consuming it along with you guys,” he says, “But I think that’s great. I think that I’m on the same page as everyone else, and I like feeling that way. I don’t like feeling like I’m superior.”

The “Takeover” footage dropped as part of HipHopVCR’s Jay-Z vs. Nas Week, which has sparked a war in his YouTube comments like it’s 2001 again. “You’ll see a lot of heated debate and arguments that people are having about Jay-Z and Nas,” he says. “Meanwhile, Nas and Jay-Z are not having this beef, but to many people, it’s still happening. And I think it’s because I took them back in time.”

The viral footage caused hysteria online. Dozens of media outlets posted about the unearthed footage. Dreamville’s President Ibrahim Hamad spoke for many when he tweeted, “Getting fuckin chills finally getting to see this footage of Jay set at Summer Jam. Been hearing and picturing what this set was like for like 20 years and this shit is even more fire then I imagined. The energy in that building.”

That’s the exact kind of excitement Abreu wants to share with the world. “[The clip] was a lot more than just entertainment. It was history,” he says. “This is not rap, this is not music. This is not a beef between Nas and Jay-Z. This is world history. That’s it. It’s important. We don’t have to categorize it as rap music or hip-hop. We could subcategorize it, but at the end of the day it was historical, and how do we know what history is until time has passed. So everything is important, and that’s the way I see it.”

In addition to the HipHopVCR project, Abreu says he’s looking to collaborate with people in the industry on ideas that he can’t execute on his own. “The hip-hop culture is like a college we all went to, and even though we’ve graduated, we can always go back and meet with a professor and sit with them and go, ‘Hey, I have an idea. Can you help me out with this?’ And since we went to that college, they’re going to help you out. That’s how I feel hip-hop culture should be.”

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