While the opening act was lukewarm at best, Trinidad Jame$ and headliner Wiz Khalifa managed to ignite the crowd Saturday night during a concert at First Security Amphitheater in downtown Little Rock.
Dubbed the Under the Influence tour, the entire Taylor Gang made appearances during the three-hour concert. The crowd remained sparse and underwhelemed while opening artists like Berner, Kirk Knight, Nick Caution and Joey Bada$$ made persistent pleas to “Turn it up!”
They also made several references to performing new tracks, but these guys seemed to have more of a splinter-cell following within the overall crowd and few people responded to the new stuff, which was lackluster and amateurish. It was hard to tell who was who because, as one concertgoer put it: “Every time you look away another person is on the stage when you look back.”
Apparent apathy turned to applause when Jame$ and his crew rode onto stage on bicycles. When Jame$ commanded “Turn it the [bleep] up!” The crowd responded.
“First, I got a positive message,” he said. “Repeat after me: Dream. Believe. Turn up.” Then the music for U.E.N.O began and the crowd roared to life again.
James delivered a lively 30-minute set ending with “All Gold Everything,” his hip hop ode to the precious metal.
The show hit another lull after Jame$. It took about 30 minutes for Khalifa to take the stage. During the long silence — background music went off after about 10 minutes — one had time to wonder if Khalifa was still smoking one of the “special cigarettes” that he loves so much.
Khalifa opened with “Bout Me” and followed that with “Work Hard Play Hard.” And his Kush & Orange Juice Band played it hard with thunderous, bone-rattling bass that would make any rock band envious.
He sampled several of his popular songs and some less familiar to the casual fan. At one point he sat at the edge of the stage to perform “Up,” a slow burner that would seem at first to be romantic but is betrayed by the line "because eveything's better when you're high."
The sultry-voiced Courtney Noelle, his background singer repeated the line while Khalifa disappeared from stage for a few seconds, something he did several times during strategic pauses.
As he performed “So What” two men, one dressed as a “special cigarette” the other as a cigarette lighter danced around him so it wasn’t hard to imagine what he was doing during his breaks. The concert continued to at least 10:35 p.m. when he finally treated the crowd to perhaps his most popular song “Black and Yellow.”
Correction: The original story incorrectly identified Khalifa's band. It has been corrected in the story above.