Weezie Baby!

It was 9 o'clock last night and my partner in crime and I decided it was about time to head over to the ACC. The doors to Lil' Wayne's I Am Music tour opened at 7pm, but we made the executive decision that neither one of us had any interest in seeing any of the 4 opening acts - one of which took the stage before the doors even opened to the public (huh?). Wayne was scheduled to take the stage at 9, but has been notoriously late (shocking!) to meet his fans. In fact, in Montreal the evening prior he was over an hour later than expected. So needless to say, we were not concerned. After getting a couple of sodas and taking our seats at 9:30pm, we had just enough time to take off our winter gear when the lights dimmed and the bass started to pound and out popped Weezie baby!

The sound system boomed and the capacity ACC screamed and shrieked with glee when the New Orleans native took the stage. He opened the show with a bang - the familiar beat of one of The Carter III's best songs - Mr. Carter came out the speakers. The crowd happily sang along with each word and that would be the theme for the night. Even though Wayne has put out enough material in the last 3 years that would take most musicians an entire career to produce, the fans that paid up to $250 from scalpers for tickets, rapped and sang along with all of his songs, whether they were from his commercial albums or his mixtape efforts.

With so many songs in his repertoire and being featured on so many tunes in the past year, it was a good fit to bring T-Pain out to have a "feature off". While Weezie did push-ups and T-Pain did some calisthenics, they had a nice back and forth going through the catalogue of features each has been on. The announcement at the end of the spot is what should have fans of the rapper and his feature buddy excited - the T-Wayne album. Even though the "best of both worlds" concept has failed in the past, expect some monster radio play from this record when it drops.

After a couple of wardrobe changes and going backwards through his catalogue of albums, the highlight of which was "fireman" complete with pyrotechnics, he resumed doing songs off of the album he is touring to support. "La La", "Mr. Officer", "Shoot Me Down" were all part of the second half of the show, during which he brought out Keri Hilson (one of the opening acts) and Drake who is a R&B cat from Toronto now on Wayne's Young Money record label, to sing some hooks. He finished the show on a high note with "A Milli" and then the lights went on and people started to file out of the building. No encore was kind of disappointing, but according to a source both the ACC and Lil' Wayne's management knew the show was running late and just played "A Milli" as the last song instead of using it as the encore as he has done in other cities.

The show definitely entertained and kept my attention for the hour and a half he was on stage. Even though Wayne controlled the crowd, he still has much to learn about "stadium show" production. Some flames, a spotlight and black backdrop don't cut it when face value of the ticket is $90. He needs to take some cues from Mr. Kanye West on set production and crowd interaction. Would I go again? Hell yeah!

Peace!