There ain’t no love in the heart of the city, but there is a well-appointed penthouse with champers on ice, a four-poster bed swaddled in French count sheets and a quiet storm station on the hi-fi. This is Mary J Blige and Jay-Z’s spiritual home these days, and they weren’t about to let us forget how bourgie they’ve become. Not that it’s a problem — the slickness suits them better than it would, say, the Wu-Tang Clan in 2008 — but on a double-bill like this somebody inevitably loses, and Jay-Z’s fitted-rocking core fanbase looking for a four-pound-cockin’ good time went home with something to be pissed about, if only mildly.

Everybody else, particularly the couples, went home and made babies. Mark these words: there will be a small spike in the birth rate in nine months, because it was date night in the hip-hop nation, and both headliners trimmed their rougher edges accordingly. After opening with their original collaboration “Can’t Knock The Hustle” in front of a vaguely art deco-inspired chrome-and-bakelite set, including a moving projection of the New York skyline, the queen of hip-hop soul got down to business with a full band in tow, horn section, strings and all. If the Black Mountain show dragged Toronto’s rock fans perilously close to the prog-rock territory carved out by their parents, Mary J Blige’s set coasted a lot closer to the shores of ‘80s R&B than it did to hip-hop-oriented singles like the conspicuously-absent “Family Affair.”

With synths straight off an Anita Baker album and a bongo-happy auxiliary percussionist, not to mention a stage setup meant to replicate a jazz club, Blige subtly converted hits such as the buoyant “Real Love” into ‘80s belters that made you wonder whether after her next costume change, she’d come out sporting shoulder pads. But her audience ate it up, not least because a singer of her caliber doesn’t come around every day — other than Beyonce and Mariah Carey, Blige has few peers. And unlike them, she’s not a merchant of melisma;;; instead of spiraling off into the outer limits of vocalese, Mary rammed home the climaxes of ballads like “No More Drama” with guttural roars, digging in where others would have flitted away. She’s not a princess, either. No diva would drop into a crouch and bounce up and down with intensity — though they might do something as corny as punctuate a ballad called “Your Child” with live actors fighting on stage, the set’s only screaming misstep. Still, if you can resist being swept up in the defiant “Not Gon’ Cry” without getting even a little misty, you may need a tune-up in the soul department.

Then it was Jay-Z’s turn, and from the jump he seemed like he’d be using his American Gangster material to mine the same pre-Timbaland R&B territory, from “Roc Boys” with its glossy horns (after emerging from backstage to the tune of “Bad Guy” and with video of the slow-motion walk from Reservoir Dogs) to Pharrell’s explicitly retro “I Know”. He also did his verse from the remix of “Beware of the Boys,” and for a moment it seemed as though he had trotted out such a relatively obscure number just for one line: “We at home / screaming leave Iraq alone.” A brave choice for a tour touching down in middle America, no matter how low the Preznit’s approval rating sits.

And then came the call to arms — “How many people here got Reasonable Doubt?;;” Suddenly you could smell the weed smoke, the gun fingers were in the air and with a rousing “Can I Live,” we were off. Memphis Bleek came out for “U Don’t Know” (inexplicably accompanied by what looked like footage of Nirvana smashing their guitars) and “99 Problems” was made even more storming when they switched the backing track mid-song to AC/DC’s “Back In Black.” He slowed it down with crowd singalongs “Excuse Me Miss” and “Song Cry”, but by that point it had become a Jay-Z show, and people were hungry for the next hit — expectations that he tweaked by stepping to a sampler and teasing us by dropping the beats from hits he wasn’t even going to do.

With “Dirt Off Your Shoulder” and a set-ending verse from “Big Pimpin’” that nearly brought the house down, not even the boys in their fitteds could have been that annoyed. Unless they stayed for the lackluster encore, that is — as much as “Heart of the City” fit the theme, it wasn’t a closer, and the crowd had begun to disappear anyways. There were babies to be made, after all, and blunts to be smoked, flow discussed, rhymes dissected.