Review: Charlotte went wild for Kendrick Lamar. But did things have to end like that?
There’s something about hearing the opening strains of a great Kendrick Lamar song — and there are a lot of great Kendrick Lamar songs — that make fans of the 35-year-old rapper feel like they’ve been struck by a bolt of lightning.
In a good way. In the sense that they seem to suddenly have electricity coursing through their veins.
Like 15 minutes into Lamar’s “Big Steppers Tour” show at Spectrum Center in Charlotte on Tuesday night, when the “Ahhhh-rim-kim-kim, ahhhh-rim-kim-kim” intro to his seminal early hit “Backstreet Freestyle” started playing over the loudspeakers: Somewhere in the neighborhood of 13,000 people appearing as if they’d all been struck by lightning at once, convulsing, hands flapping in the air, crazed looks exploding across their faces as they shout-sing the opening salvo.
Uh, Martin had a dreeeam!
MARTIN HAD A DREEEAM!!
KENDRICK HAVE A DREEEEAM!!!
Or, like two songs later, when Lamar settled onto a bench and used one finger to pound out the brooding piano loop from 2017’s “HUMBLE.,” arguably his biggest hit ever: Everybody, jumping up and down, crashing into the person next to them, letting the hip-hop star take the rapid-fire “Nobody pray for me / It been that day for me” part then, in unison, screaming the “WAAYYYYYYYYY! YEEUH, YEEUH!”
But this doesn’t necessarily adequately capture how frenetic the vibe was here, in this arena, in this city, for Lamar.
There’ve certainly been sold-out shows at Spectrum before. And yes, of course, when any big-name artist performs their big-name songs at a live show, fans are going to get pretty excited.
This, though, felt different. Wilder.
Wilder for sure, in terms of energy, than Lamar’s show at the same venue five years ago this month, one that happened less than eight months before Lamar became a Pulitzer Prize winner (for “DAMN.,” his powerful, raw 2017 album).
It was evident before the headliner even got to headline Tuesday. North of 80% of the available seats were full and the GA pit was shoulder-to-shoulder 25 concertgoers deep by 8:10 p.m., when the rapper Baby Keem took the stage; and if you’d come through the ticket line into the building at 8:11, you might have thought you were missing the beginning of Lamar’s set based on the roars drifting out onto the concourse.
Most notably, Baby Keem’s cover of Kanye West’s “Praise God” and his solo rendition of “range brothers” (originally a duet with Lamar) turned the pit into a magnificent mass of moshers. Then, on command, he got an astonishing amount of fans to light up their phones for melodic uptempo hit “16” (the array of cell lights all the more surprising because it’s not a ballad).
At just 21, Keem — Lamar’s much-younger cousin — proved he has the stage presence of a headliner.
What he doesn’t have is a deep catalog, or a big budget. So he performed his opening set by himself with few frills on Lamar’s vast stage, which jutted out via catwalks into the center of the arena. And he was on and off in just 29 minutes.
Lamar, meanwhile, has recorded so many hits over the past 10 years that it’s got to be a considerable challenge for him to figure out what to play ... yet he probably could have rapped the manuals for the major kitchen appliances he owns and still had fans hanging on his every word, undulating to every beat.
He also could have just performed, like his cousin, by himself with few frills. But, like last time he was here, Lamar showcased several stunning set pieces and a knack for staging of his ideas in thought-provoking ways.
There was his black military-style suit — similar to the one he wore during his Super Bowl halftime performance in February, with the gold adornments on its left breast — though this time he put a Michael Jackson-inspired sequined glove on his left hand (instead of the black leather one he donned for the game).
There were the four stone-faced female backup dancers in crisp white suits and the larger contingent of stone-faced male dancers in crisp black ones, appearing in all sorts of configurations to execute choreography with a military-like precision to match Lamar’s outfit.
For “United in Grief,” the lead-off song of both his latest album and of his set, he took a turn as a ventriloquist, machine-gun-fire rapping lines like “Bought a couple of mansions, just for practice” while holding a 3-foot-tall puppet version of himself that flapped its wooden gums.
A little over an hour later, Lamar and four men in full hazmat suits stepped into a giant, see-through, box-shaped tent where he pretended to submit to a nasal-swab COVID test; then, with one hazmatted man standing in each corner, facing out, the rapper swerved and stomped through his double-Grammy-winning 2015 hit “Alright.”
After that, the tent was lifted nearly 20 feet into the air, and Lamar delivered his next two selections — new song “Mirror” and the funky “LOYALTY.,” his 2017 collab with Rihanna — from inside it, as fog and hazy blue then hazy orange light swirled around him.
The most captivating set piece, however, might have been the crowd.
Historically (or, at least, in my general experience), Charlotte concertgoers are all too often overly unenthusiastic. I don’t know whether it’s the prevailing politeness of people in the South, or the stuffiness that goes along with this being a financial capital, or something in the city water that makes us more inhibited, but ...
... it is typically not at all easy to get a crowd worked up here. From the outset Tuesday night, though, Lamar’s fans were on whole ’nother level. (Mostly for better; sometimes for worse. Read on.)
The scene in the pit, for example, could have been ripped straight from Coachella.
Songs like “m.A.A.d city” and “B----, Don’t Kill My Vibe” would start and tightly packed throngs of college kids with not a care about Covid would pinball off one another while repeatedly jumping a foot and a half in the air. The sea would part slightly and a dozen cellphone lights would point into the gap to indicate the start of a serious moshing sesh, then bodies would begin colliding as if they’d been thrown into a washing machine.
From the lower level, which contained plenty of young people but also large helpings of folks closer to middle age, the general-admission section looked like chaos — and most likely, it probably was.
But there was plenty of it in the seated sections, too.
Within five minutes after Lamar arrived on stage, as columns of flames shot up from the stage and he seethed through “N95,” the wide aisle between Section 106 (where I was sitting) and 105 became flooded with looky-loos who’d floated down from their assigned seats to get a closer view. This just doesn’t normally happen at a show at Spectrum Center, and it may have caught venue staff off-guard, based simply on the fact that it didn’t start shooing until there were more than a hundred people creating a fire hazard.
Indeed, ushers and security personnel had their hands full.
I didn’t see any fighting, but just from my seat alone I saw all manner of successful and failed attempts by young people attempting to self-upgrade their seats. On multiple occasions, I witnessed the usher at the bottom of my section thwarting kids who were trying to sneak onto the floor without the required wristbands.
The one “empty” seat next to me, which was technically mine (my wife decided to stay home at the last minute), remained occupied for most of the show by two young men who I repeatedly heard conspiring to rush past the usher. (They never made it.)
If there’s anything else to complain about, it’s that the concert seemed to climax early — then abruptly.
After Baby Keem’s return for a supercharged duet with Lamar on “family ties” pushed the crowd over the edge into delirium one more time, hundreds of fans made for the exits even though the headliner still had three songs to go. Probably because they’d already gotten the megahits they came for, and had peeked at the setlist, and therefore knew Lamar was wrapping with some of the deepest and most introspective work on his new album “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers.”
Those who left early missed yet more impressive spectacle: Lamar at the piano again for “Crown”; first opener Tanna Leone returning to rap and dance wildly amid a burst of flames and fireworks; a mesmerizing bit of lockstep choreography involving all of Lamar’s dancers during the finale, “Savior.”
They also missed the most jarring ending to a concert I’ve ever experienced.
As “Savior” came to a close, the rapper stood before his piano in near-darkness. Then he and it sunk into the stage, the gigantic curtain dropped, and basically one second later, the arena’s house lights came on. Not just on, though — like, FULL BLAST. No bow, no encore, no outro. Just LIGHTS.
On the whole, Lamar gave another masterclass of a hip-hop show on Tuesday night, over the course of an hour and 37 minutes and 25 songs that were performed in exhilarating fashion.
But if someone was looking for a way to kill my vibe, in an instant, at the end of it?
They succeeded.
Kendrick Lamar’s setlist
1. “United in Grief”
2. “N95”
3. “ELEMENT.”
4. “Worldwide Steppers”
5. “Backseat Freestyle”
6. “Rich Spirit”
7. “HUMBLE.”
8. “Father Time”
9. “m.A.A.d city”
10. “Purple Hearts”
11. “King Kunta”
12. “Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe” (Remix)
13. “Die Hard”
14. “DNA.”
15. “Count Me Out”
16. “Money Trees”
17. “LOVE.”
18. “Alright”
19. “Mirror”
20. “LOYALTY.”
21. “Silent Hill”
22. “family ties” (Baby Keem cover) (with Baby Keem)
23. “Crown”
24. “Mr. Morale” (with Tanna Leone)
25. “Savior”
This story was originally published August 3, 2022 at 1:12 PM.
