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Live Review: Lil Wayne at Travis County Expo Center
Hip-hop fans put up with a lot.
Acts not showing up on time and making audiences wait for hours, lackadaisical live shows, rapping over CDs, that sort of thing.
And has anyone in the history of the world ever believed the phrase “So-and-so is in the building?” Who the heck cares if they’re in the building? I went on a tour of the White House once - doesn’t mean I saw the president, and he was right upstairs.
Lil Wayne made ‘em wait Thursday night at the Expo Center. Rumor had it he was going on between 9 and 10. But he delivered a massive set starting around 11, touching on his entire career, displaying the deeply weird combination of spacey charisma and 90-packs-a-day Nawlins drawl that has made him the up (up-from-the-)underground rap sensation of 2008.
But it took hours to get to that point. It took a good 45 minutes to get into the Expo Center parking lot — only one entrance was open from Decker Lane and everyone lined up on the shoulder to turn into the lot. Then it took about 45 minutes to get out.
Then a series of openers took the (bare-naked) stage. A few local acts, a comedian, even Boogie and DJ Kurupt from Hot 93.3 did their level best to entertain an increasingly cranky (and jammed) Expo Center. The crawl of text messages on the Jumbo(ish)tron was as entertaining as anything else. A few personal favorites: “Cam sorry i gave the backstage pass to bekah i still love you - pizza,”; “Carmen will you marry me”; and “where is he? my curfew’s up in 10 mins.” Much of the discourse revolved around, as one message put it, “bring wayne out already.”
As some of the crowd had been there since (according to rumor) 5 p.m., all was forgiven when Wayne took the stage in his red ball cap a little after 11 p.m. Rapping over pre-recorded tracks (was it a CD or just beats? The cavernous Expo Center made it hard to tell), Wayne opened with his verses from Shawty Lo’s “Dey Know (Remix).” “My flow crazy I ain’t too sane.” Word.
“I am here on behalf of Cash Money, Young Money, God and you,” Wayne said. “I ain’t (expletive) without you.”
Wayne is not an overnight success. He’s been rapping since he was 14 with the Hot Boys, but he’s still only 25 years old. As a guy who got famous off (and often puts his best work on) gray-market mixtapes, Wayne knows the value of street-level engagement. Hence such gestures as telling the crowd to get their camera phones out as he posed for a picture at the edge of the stage.
Which is why people love him - after all, he’s the only artist this year to sell more than one million CDs in the first week of sales this year and displaced Coldplay this week to retake the no. 1 slot.
Songs (or bits of songs) such as “Duffel Bag Boy,” “Shoot Me Down,” and “I Feel Like Dying” sent him bounding across the stage. He got the crowd to join him on the “Thisa way, thata way” chorus of T-Pain’s “Got Money.” Nobody seemed to care how exhausting and often dull the previous few hours had been.
Such is the wonder-working power of Lil Wayne.
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Permalink | Comments (4) | Categories: Music, Reviews
Comments
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By j
July 11, 2008 4:06 PM | Link to this
Dont hate,joe gross
he was late but it was a great show. i love it, enjoy myself. you mean 93.3 was no good. j
By Mayday
July 11, 2008 4:49 PM | Link to this
The review doesn’t seem like he was “hating”. Reviews are usually critiques of the whole event not just the performance. The event logistics, rather than the performance, incurred the predominance of disapproval. In spite of the poor event implementation it seems like he’s still giving the artist his due for entertaining the fans who endured the long event.
By j.dubb*
July 13, 2008 3:49 AM | Link to this
wayne had a good show. he was real late but it was a good show all together. but the artist before him where not soo good.
By jonathan
July 20, 2008 7:50 PM | Link to this
haha. that “carmen will you marry me” was a txt message that i sent. that’s funny. & ur right about him being late joe. but as everybody is making a point…it was worth the wait. everybody was their cuz they were true lil wayne fans. and even if it took him hours to come out i think people got wat they wanted. i know i did.