On the floor of the Baltimore Arena Monday night, a couple dozen kids with broccoli haircuts played duck duck goose. Why not? Those broccoli haircut kids had space, and they had time. They had so much time. Doors opened around 7 p.m., and A$AP Rocky, on his first proper tour in seven years, didn’t perform until nearly three hours later. If you were there from the beginning, you had to do something to fill up that time. You could stare at your phone until it ran out of batteries, you could get into a fight with someone, or you could play duck duck goose.
How does this happen? At this point, the rap arena tour is a fully established form of live entertainment. People have a good idea what works and what doesn’t. The Baltimore Arena — it’s technically the CFG Bank Arena now, but nobody calls it that — has seen more than its share of rap tours. When I was a kid, the hip-hop bills at the arena would be absolutely packed, and they look even more insane in retrospect: Public Enemy, the Geto Boys, A Tribe Called Quest, Queen Latifah, Naughty By Nature, and MC Lyte, all on the same bill. Big-ticket rap shows have grown more elaborate and sophisticated over the decades, but certain tenets haven’t really changed. Like: You’re not supposed to put thousands of kids into the same room with nothing to do for hours on end.
On his current Don’t Be Dumb arena tour, A$AP Rocky has no opening acts. He doesn’t even have a warmup DJ. Instead, someone plays a loop of ambient hazy-keyboard new age aquarium music until the lights suddenly go down and the headlining set starts. This doesn’t make sense to me. Our own Chris DeVille points out that Jay-Z and Kanye West also had no opener when they toured behind Watch The Throne, that perhaps Rocky “thinks that’s what you do if you’re a serious artist slash icon.” But A$AP Rocky, try as he might, is not Jay-Z and Kanye West at the same time in 2011.
Thrones tour aside, there’s a logic to the way most tours work. Ascendant rappers get crucial experience by serving as openers, and fans get to hear stuff that might’ve passed them by otherwise. A$AP Rocky was an arena-show opener once; he and Kendrick Lamar famously did supporting duty on Drake’s Club Paradise tour in 2012. The last time Rocky mounted a proper tour in 2019, one of his openers was Playboi Carti, now an arena headliner himself. But even if you’re not trying to help mint a new superstar, opening acts serves crucial functions. They bring up the excitement level, and they give people something to look at.
Based on Setlist.fm accounts, most of Rocky’s sets on this tour have begun around 9 p.m. In Baltimore, it was a lot closer to 10. Monday happened to be the night that Madison Square Garden hosted its first NBA Finals game in more than a quarter-century. Rocky, who was out in the NY streets after the Knicks’ dramatic game-two victory, started his show around halftime, and I don’t think that was a coincidence. I get it, but shit, I wanted to watch that game, too. If you’re going to make everyone wait that long, the least you could do is play the game on the jumbotron, with or without the express written consent of the National Basketball Association.
Can A$AP Rocky really afford to keep people waiting for that long, when his uneven recent comeback album didn’t exactly set the world on fire and his reputation mostly rests on the stylishly woozy cloud-rap bangers that he made more than a decade ago? I guess he can. I was surprised. In recent years, Rocky has mostly been in the public eye as Rihanna’s doting partner and as a tertiary bit player in the Drake/Kendrick saga that refuses to die. Rocky is a 37-year-old dad, his baby mama ain’t even post his single, etc. But Rocky still filled the Baltimore Arena with broccoli-haircut boys and extravagantly made-up girls. I was there because my 13-year-old son (who does not have a broccoli haircut, though I wouldn’t be upset if he did) wanted to see Rocky. It was my kid’s second concert ever, after Kendrick Lamar and SZA last year. I heard that secondary-market tickets went for cheap, but I didn’t see a lot of empty seats. Apparently, this man still has juice.
My son plays Rocky in the car all the time, and he says he learned about Rocky through “TikTok, probably.” This checks out. As I write this, the most Spotify-streamed song on Rocky’s Don’t Be Dumb album isn’t anything new; it’s a remix of the 2011 mixtape track “Demons,” now mashed up with the Clams Casino beat from Lil B’s “I’m God” and tacked onto a deluxe edition. Other random old Rocky tracks continue to do big numbers. The extremely fired-up girls sitting behind us knew every word to every song and yelled that shit loud. (I spent most of the show awkwardly perched on an armrest because I didn’t want to block the view of the very very small girl directly behind me. This is called responsible tallness.) Rocky’s entire discography doesn’t seem to much as matter as his general vibe — a warm, charismatic, stylish, spaced-out friendliness that none of his peers can fully replicate.
So Rocky filled this arena, on a Monday night, with much younger people who were genuinely excited to see him and whose excitement managed to survive the grim and endless waiting period that got pretty much everyone in the arena grumbling. That’s half the battle. And when the actual show finally started, the lack of an opening act made a bit more sense. This is just speculation, but maybe Rocky blew the tour’s entire budget by turning his own set into a wild-ass spectacle. On that level, the Don’t Be Dumb Tour is something to behold.
The aesthetic concept of the Don’t Be Dumb tour has something to do with totalitarian chic — the inherent drama of a world where people are constantly at war with an omnipresent security state. Rocky’s live show starts off with a series of extended setpieces that clearly intend to evoke the larger-than-life chaos of a ’90s action movie. (Someone definitely had the opening scenes from Demolition Man on a moodboard.) Blacked-out American flags and “Big Brother is always watching” banners hang around the stage, while a prop police helicopter dangles from the ceiling. When the lights go down, that helicopter descends, shining its spotlight all around the room before finding Rocky and friends wilding out in the crowd.
The aesthetic concept of the Don’t Be Dumb tour has something to do with totalitarian chic — the inherent drama of a world where people are constantly at war with an omnipresent security state. Rocky’s live show starts off with a series of extended setpieces that clearly intend to evoke the larger-than-life chaos of a ’90s action movie. (Someone definitely had the opening scenes from Demolition Man on a moodboard.) Blacked-out American flags and “Big Brother is always watching” banners hang around the stage, while a prop police helicopter dangles from the ceiling. When the lights go down, that helicopter descends, shining its spotlight all around the room before finding Rocky and friends wilding out in the crowd.
I don’t think most of A$AP Rocky’s newer songs bring enough fire to effectively soundtrack those moments. At times, the music itself was the weakest part of the entire overwhelming presentation. Rocky mostly just rapped over his own pre-recorded vocals, and the megaphone-mic that he used for his entire set probably didn’t really help with any athletic displays of straight-up rapping that Rocky might’ve wanted to do. But that’s not really what the arena-rap show is about today. It’s about vibe-curation, which has always been an A$AP Rocky specialty. He managed to turn the arena spectacle into something that felt genuinely chaotic and unpredictable. That can’t be easy.
This was my second time seeing A$AP Rocky live. The first time I saw him, my son was still a couple of months away from being born. At SXSW in 2012, Rocky played a late-night Vice party, and he came onstage after Trash Talk, which meant the audience was really riled up, hurling trash barrels at each other and shit. People kept throwing beer at Rocky while he performed, and he did not like that. First, he pleaded with the crowd to stop. Then, he demanded it. Finally, he asked people to start pointing out who in the crowd was throwing the beer. Near me, one guy fully clotheslined another guy onto the concrete floor. I left for a minute to hit a Port-A-Potty outside, and by the time I made it back in, the show was over. A$AP Mob got into a big brawl with fans, and everything shut down in a hurry.
I can still remember the feeling of combustible tension in the air that night, and I bet Rocky does, too. The stage show felt like an attempt to recreate that feeling in a relatively safe environment, and it worked better than I expected. Once Rocky ran through all those opening theatrics, a relatively conventional rap concert, albeit one with lots of dramatic pyro, got underway. Rocky spent much of the show with a ski mask over his face, and I wanted to joke about how he could’ve done the MF DOOM thing and sent out his Mandalorian stuntmen while he watched the Knicks game in the back. But no, Rocky has presence, and you can tell it’s absolutely him even when he’s masked up.
The regular rap-show part: pretty good! Not flawless, though. Rocky kept shouting about the moshpit, and that moshpit was something I might’ve seen when Less Than Jake played a Warped Tour side stage at 2 p.m. in 1997. It was not scary. Rocky kept asking the crowd to pray for the Knicks, which didn’t work, but it was hard to hear what he was saying over the helicopter sound-effects drowning out the stage-patter parts. I’m pretty sure, however, that he apologized to some kid for not signing his sneakers because it would’ve gone against whatever brand deal he currently has going. Also, I don’t know how you leave potential anthems like “Lord Pretty Flacko Jodye 2” off the setlist.
Still, Rocky has hits. He has some hits that I didn’t even know were hits. “Everyday,” the Rod Stewart/Mark Ronson/Miguel pile-up from 2015, works shockingly well as a full-arena singalong. Psych-pop tracks like “Sundress” get big reactions in this setting. I jumped out of my seat for “Peso” and “Goldie” like the old man that I am. Near the end of the set, “L$D” hits like “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” The crowd was too young for the hit-parade part to feel properly nostalgic. Instead, Rocky’s old songs have all taken on their own lives over the years, becoming party songs for kids who weren’t old enough to party when those songs first hit blogs like this one.
Maybe that’s TikTok doing what TikTok does. A piece of evocative, stylish music from the past can suddenly experience a sudden and mysterious resurgence and become omnipresent all over again. That’s good news for A$AP Rocky, someone who built his empire on evocative, stylish music. Rocky should really avoid making any audience wait that long again, but he’s still a hot enough commodity to afford that kind of indulgence. That’s a striking form of power — when kids are so excited to see your simulated riot that they won’t break out into a real one.
