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The parking lots on Prairie Street in Inglewood love to see me coming. Whenever I’m running late to a show at the Forum or Sofi—i.e., always—I find myself at the mercy of the same corner lot and whatever they deign to upcharge as we get closer to showtime. They saw a fair amount of me in the past week or so, thanks to an especially loaded tour schedule in LA that brought A$AP Rocky and Rosalía to the Forum within days of each other, while Don Toliver tore down the Staples Center (referring to it as Crypto is like calling Twitter “X”) in between.
It’s to the point where I’ve inspired my own one-man loyalty program: when I pulled up at Rocky, the garage owner Derrick recognized me—“My man always be at everything”—and gave me a homie discount; days later, with minutes to spare before Rosalía took the stage, as he shooed everyone else away from the already full lot, he instructed his employees to lift the cones and let me in. So shoutout to Derrick, shoutout to the tour gods for lining up a blockbuster summer of shows in LA, and shoutout to being blessed enough to attend all three, which will absolutely go down as some of the must-see tours of the year.
A$AP Rocky, Don’t Be Dumb Tour
For the last decade and a half, A$AP Rocky has arguably been making the best music videos in hip-hop, so it should come as no surprise that he can put together such a visually engrossing live show. While lot of artists at his level coast on surface-level vibes that are really just one or two degrees removed from an idea someone else already did before, Rocky is a true innovator, for better and 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 cited Tim Burton as a major influence for his at-long-last-released (and honestly, underrated) fourth album Don’t Be Dumb, and as he opened the show rapping “Helicopter” from an actual helicopter on the ceiling while jack-booted dancers in SWAT riot gear raged below him, he looked every bit like Jack Nicholson’s Joker throwing dollars and laughing gas out to the citizens of Gotham from his parade float. It was, in a word, not simply turnt, but cool. It felt cinematic, and it made that song and others from the album feel even bigger than they do on wax. (Providing the entire arena with white tees to spin in the air as the song instructs certainly helped.)
That’s the thing: for all the hiatuses, the years of snippets, loosies and leaks, and the jokes from critics and enemies that music is the last thing anyone thinks of him for these days, Rocky commands a pretty loyal, unwavering fanbase. Much has been made of his ability to keep booking festival headlining slots even with no new music, but a sold-out tour his first time on the road in seven years is even more impressive. Despite the sabbatical, he showed no rust. The crowd obviously went nuclear for Tyler, The Creator’s cameo, as any LA arena would and does, but Rocky held the room on his own for much of the show. The only time he briefly locked out? Catching his son Riot’s gaze in the crowd, towards the end.
To that end, though, the show would’ve hit even harder if it felt tighter. At one point Rocky assembled Danny Elfman and his band on stage for Dumb’s lead single; it was a dope tableau but took a little long to set up. Often there were transitions where, in service of setting Rocky’s ideas up, the energy lapsed a little and over-relied on A$AP Lou screaming at everyone to keep the tees spinning amidst loud, droning helicopter whirring, which got old. Rocky didn’t even remove the ghoulish mask he wears to start the show until about an hour in; the rapper they call Pretty Flacko is so committed to his bits that he covers his face for half the show. My last note? Sequencing. Rocky has joints, both crowd-pleaser singles and features and core fanbase favorites—the crowd spent half of the night pleading for “L$D” until he finally acquiesced towards the end, and went up for album cuts like “Angels” or “Excuse Me.” But the first part of the show didn’t mix those songs in well-enough, opting to run through a lot of the new album first, and he took a lot of breathers between songs where in my opinion it’s always a little more impressive when a performer just seamlessly transitions from banger to banger to banger.