I had been looking forward to September 11, 2001, for what seemed like forever.

Actually it wasn’t just me—my roommates and I had all been waiting for months. We all knew it was going to be a big deal. After years of rumbling, it was finally going to come to a head. I knew it. My roommates knew it. It was pretty much common knowledge.

I mean, even people in the streets of New York knew it was going to be huge. My roommate had gone to NY a few weeks earlier and had returned with some stuff that had leaked, so we were prepared. We knew what was coming and that it was going to change everything forever, or at least in our corner of the world. And even though we braced for it, we still weren’t really ready for it.

Earlier in the summer, Jay-Z had put Mobb Deep on blast at Summer Jam and alluded to Nas at the end of the inaugural performance of “The Takeover”. Of course, Nas took the bait, and responded with this “Stillmatic” freestyle, after which Jay-Z added the Nas verse to “The Takeover”. And the album featuring “The Takeover”, The Blueprint, was to going to be released on September 11, 2001.

We’d already copped a bootleg of the album. In that era you had to cop the bootleg in addition to the retail copy, as it would usually feature a different mix of a song that perhaps got tied up due to sample clearances or something like that. And then you still got the retail copy because it was the right thing to do. Plus I’m a fiend for liner notes and hidden bonus tracks.

So when I woke up on 9/11/01, I was pumped to get The Blueprint. It was my main reason for leaving the house. Sure, technically I had to go to work, but getting that album was my momentum for the day. Plus Fabolous’s debut, Ghetto Fabolous, was also dropping and at the time those were two of the biggest emcees out. And they were dropping on the same day?! Insane!

And since we’d already had the bootleg on heavy rotation, we all knew how dope the album was. It was just a matter of finding out who’d done the production, because the beats were sick. My roommate and I knew that the dude who’d done “1-900 Hustler” had provided some beats for the album, because parts of the song had his sound. And we were curious about dude Kanye West, a producer so bold that he tattooed the titles of the songs that he’d produced on his arm.

I went to work. Because it was 9/11/01 coupled with the fact that my place of employment rested in the shadow of the World Trade Center Baltimore, my boss decided that work wasn’t really that pressing on that day. And so a co-worker and I went down to The Soundgarden and I purchased The Blueprint, Ghetto Fabolous and some other stuff. Then we had a nice lunch.

Then I went home. And my roommates turned off the news and we listened to The Blueprint. We savored the audio quality. We devoured the liner notes. We relished the bonus tracks. The Blueprint was everything we’d hoped it would be and more.

Maybe The Blueprint distracted us. Or maybe The Blueprint allowed us to keep our cool. Perhaps The Blueprint was our touchstone, the thing that remained the same before and after 9/11/01.

All I know is that I still love that album. So, happy anniversary.