Blueface and Lil Baby, last night at the Midland (review)
Thursday night’s show at the Truman was the second local headlining gig in less than a year for rising Atlanta rap star Lil Baby. After a less-than-great Truman debut in August, it seems that Baby’s team at Quality Control Music has made some necessary adjustments. His highest-charting single, “Drip Too Hard,” also came out a month after the last tour.
A team of dancers greeted Baby as he arrived onstage and jumped straight into “Yes Indeed,” his Drake collab. Perhaps due to the stakes being a tad higher this time around — the theater’s balcony was roped off, but the floor was nearly full — Baby was more energetic and focused from the get-go. True to his name, his youthful face would often light up as he strutted across the stage and prepared to dive into a chorus, a sight that’s tough to remember seeing more than once or twice at last year’s show.
The verbal acrobatics on “Southside” were highly engaging, “Freestyle” was delivered with impressive gusto, and every end-of-song a cappella moment reminded fans of the understated, bluesy warbling that makes Baby so intriguing as a vocalist.
Baby’s hot streak lasted an impressive 40 minutes or so until he let a few duds go. In retrospect, “My Drip,” from his 2017 tape Harder Than Hard, sounds like an embarrassing rough draft of the material he was due to release the following year. Despite its brevity, this cold streak felt twice its length due to Baby’s often-formulaic flows.
While it was no hall-of-fame effort, those pitfalls hardly ruined Baby’s performance. “Close Friends,” a rough-and-tumble romance from he and Gunna’s Drip Harder, seemed to connect with all the lovebirds in the room, and closing number “Sold Out Dates,” while being slightly anti-climatic due to the not-sold-out nature of the concert, made for an enjoyable, confetti-ready sendoff.
But if Lil Baby’s hour-long set of no-nonsense trap music was a hearty dinner, then Blueface’s opening slot was Kansas City being served its dessert first. The Los Angeles rapper’s outrageous g-funk breakout, “Thotiana,” peaked at number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier this month, propelled to rap radio by a tidal wave of online support.
Blueface (born Jonathan Porter) is the latest, er, face, of hip-hop’s ongoing intergenerational discourse over the genre’s purity. Haters loathe his Benjamin Franklin face tattoo, goofy antics, and beat-adjacent bars. Do any research, though, and you’ll find that the 22-year-old star has already gained the support of West Coast heroes like E-40 and Kendrick Lamar.
It’d be easy to write off Porter’s performance as one riddled with gimmicks, but to anyone paying attention, it’s abundantly clear that he was just being Blueface (who Porter admits is a character with his own personality, just turned up a bit). He puffed a blunt for what seemed like the whole set, flashed fans his abs, crip-walked with a passion, and tugged at his waistband during a faithful execution of his “bussdown” dance.
Between songs, Porter urged fans to pull out their phones. “Y’all ready to go viral!?” he inquired. He used that word a lot on Thursday: viral. It’s hard to blame him. Social media has worked wonders for Blueface’s career.
Closing his set, he mopped the stage to his latest single, “Bleed It.” The whole thing felt like a 20 minute highlight reel. Grown men were dancing. Girls were screaming their throats sore. Porter simultaneously played the all-star athlete and the teenage heartthrob. The guy is impressive.
Brief opening sets were provided by three other emerging acts. Atlanta rapper Marlo’s slow-and-low trap tunes hewed closely to many of the sound’s fundamentals laid out by Jeezy over a decade ago (too many teens in the crowd for these songs to land properly); Detroit’s 42 Dugg proved to be a charming young talent from a Midwestern city with a gritty sound on the rise; and Florida rapper-singer Jordan Hollywood presented a forgettable set of songs abbreviated with dime-a-dozen nuggets about “the industry” and vague motivational tidbits.
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