Jay Z Apparently Predicted New York City’s Con Ed Explosion In Rap Lyrics Eight Years Ago

Jay Z apparently saw New York City’s Con Ed explosion coming nearly a decade ago.

After the energy company’s transformer explosion this week lit the city’s night sky in a bright blue, many of the rapper’s fans recalled that he seemed to predict such an event happening. As Hollywood Life noted, the rapper’s 2010 song, “Light Up,” with Drake, seemed to reference it directly.

“Con Edison flowin’, I’m connected to a higher power/Bright lights will make your whole city light up/A trillion-watt light bulb when I’m in the night club,” Jay Z rapped.

A number of the rapper’s fans took to Twitter to note the strange coincidence, wondering if Jay Z was privy to some kind of information about the upcoming explosion.

The explosion itself led to an explosion of speculation on social media, with many sharing pictures of the unnaturally blue sky and wondering if there was some kind of supernatural cause, like an alien invasion. It turned out that the light was caused by a transformer explosion at a Con Edison facility in Astoria, Queens, that created a pulsating blue light and led to power outages across Queens, including LaGuardia Airport.

As Motherboard explained, it is not all that uncommon to have a gigantic explosion in a transformer given their nature and propensity to hold in heat and energy.

Jay Z – off Drake’s “Light Up” (2010)
?"Con Edison flowing, I'm connected to a higher power?Bright lights will make your whole city light up"

Today, the Con Edison power plant explodes in New York, lighting up the whole city literally pic.twitter.com/Ke7zjw57g6

— SOUND (@itsavibe) December 28, 2018

“Transformers are basically traffic directors of energy flowing through an electricity generation system, like the one in Astoria. So damage that makes the transformer unable to regulate its temperature makes those transformers more vulnerable to exploding or catching fire.

“Picture a hot chamber full of electric circuits, getting sparked with electricity from the massive energy plant surrounding it. Now consider this: when the chamber gets hot enough, the insulating oil (often made from petroleum) becomes electrically conductive. This is a recipe for disaster.”

It’s not clear how Jay Z could have predicted this week’s Con Ed explosion, but he may have simply making a good guess based on past experience. There have actually been a number of transformer explosions in the energy company’s history, some of them quite bright and dangerous. That included one back in 2005 that scorched an apartment building and left several people injured.

As the Villager reported, the explosion was so loud that some local residents thought it was a terrorist attack, and smoke and ash filled a restaurant at the ground level when it blew up.