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The parking lot on Prairie Street in Inglewood loves to see me arrive. Whenever I run late to a show at the Forum or Sophie’s – that is, always – I find myself at the mercy of the people in the same corner and they add whatever they want as we get closer to show time. He’s seen me quite a bit this past week, thanks to a particularly packed tour schedule in L.A. that brought A$AP Rocky and Rosalía to the Forum within days of each other, while Don Toliver tore down Staples Center (referring to it as crypto is like saying “X” to Twitter) in between.
It’s to the point where I’ve inspired my own one-man loyalty program: When I went to Rocky’s, garage owner Derrick recognized me – “My guy’s always into everything” – and gave me a homie discount; A few days later, a few minutes before Rosalía was due to take the stage, after she had ushered everyone else away from the already packed crowd, she instructed her staff to lift the cones and let me in. So thank you to Derrick, thank you to the tour gods for putting on a blockbuster summer of shows in LA, and thank you to the trio for being blessed enough to attend what will surely go down as one of the few must-see tours of the year.
A$AP Rocky, Don’t Be Dumb Tour
For the past decade and a half, A$AP Rocky has been making arguably the best music videos in hip-hop, so it should come as no surprise that he can put on such an entertaining live show. While a lot of artists at his level are based on surface-level sentiments that are really only a degree or two away from an idea that someone else had already done, Rocky is a true innovator, for better and for worse. That goes for production, curation and collaboration, aesthetics, ideas – he’s always throwing a lot at the wall and trying to tie it all together under a fusion of taste and street. When it works, it works beautifully. Rocky cites Tim Burton as a major influence for his long-awaited (and honestly, underrated) fourth album don’t be fooledAnd as he opened the show rapping “Helicopter” from an actual helicopter on the rooftop while jack-booted dancers in SWAT riot gear rioted below him, he looked like Jack Nicholson’s Joker throwing dollars and laughing gas at the citizens of Gotham from his parade float. It was, in a word, not merely Ternate, but Cold. It felt cinematic, and it made that song and the other songs on the album seem even bigger on wax. (Having white T-shirts available for the entire field to twirl around in the air as the song directs certainly helped.)
That’s the thing: despite all the hiatuses, years of tidbits, leaks and leaks, and despite the jokes from critics and enemies that music is the last thing anyone thinks about him these days, Rocky has a fiercely loyal, unwavering fan base. Much has been said about their ability to continue booking major festival slots even without new music, but their selling out of full tickets on the road for the first time in seven years is even more impressive. Despite the rest, no rust was visible in them. Obviously the crowd turned out for Tyler, The Creator’s cameo, as it does in any L.A. area, but Rocky went solo for most of the show. Only when he was locked out for a period of time? Towards the end, catching the eye of his son Riott in the crowd.
However, if the show had been tighter it would have been an even bigger hit. One time Rocky gathered Danny Elfman and his band on stage DumbThe lead single of; It was a dope tableau but it took a while to set up. There were often transitions where, in service of establishing Rocky’s ideas, the energy would drop a bit and A$AP would become more reliant on Lou yelling at everyone to keep the tees spinning amidst the wheezing, wheezing sound of a loud, droning helicopter, which got old. Rocky didn’t even remove the hideous mask he wore to start the show for nearly an hour; The rapper they call Pretty Flacko is so committed to his work that he covers his face for half the show. My last note? Indexing. Rocky has JointBoth crowd-pleasing singles and features and core fanbase favorites – the crowd spent half the night pleading for “L$D” until it finally agreed, and moved on to album cuts like “Angels” or “Excuse Me”. But those songs weren’t mixed in well enough in the first half of the show, opting to play a lot of the new album first, and they took a lot of breathers between songs, where in my opinion it’s always a little more impressive when an artist just transitions from banger to banger to banger.
