The Fairytale Romance of Lil Wayne Performing Live vs the Reality
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The Fairytale Romance of Lil Wayne Performing Live vs the Reality

What should have been a celebration of one of the greatest rappers alive felt like a footnote at Amsterdam's Appelsap festival.
Ryan Bassil
London, GB

Lil Wayne should have been the cherry on the cake. Headlining a rap festival in Amsterdam, everything could have slid into place as smoothly as one of his infamous guest verses. Wayne worked on material for Tha Carter III here (as documented in the controversial documentary Tha Carter); he loves smoking weed, as do many of his listeners, and it's legal in the Dutch capital; and, well – it's Lil Wayne, widely regarded as one of the greatest to ever do it. Shoulda, woulda, coulda.

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All Wayne really had to do was turn up with a selection of his greatest hits in tow, make sure his Auto-Tune was pumped up to whatever level necessary to do that thing where his voice becomes aural serotonin, and smile one of those toothy grins (seen most recently in the "I'm The One" video). Perhaps he would creep around the stage like a blunted yet hyperactive space alien, guiding the crowd into the glitzy, seemingly extraterrestrial world that he perfected with "Love Me", his 2013 collaboration with Future and Drake. Maybe he would play "A Milli", his most ubiquitous song.

In the end Lil Wayne did some of these things, yet each time something felt distinctly off. The volume of his mic paled in comparison to his tour DJ's, whose voice lacked any redeemable qualities by virtue of him being behind decks rather than in front of them. He may well have smiled – from our spot in the crowd it was difficult to tell.

Performed on the festival's main stage in the Flevopark, a luscious green recreational park near central Amsterdam complete with a pond, the location for Wayne's set was beautiful. And that's one of just a few good things to say about it. As each song ended and another began, the energy of the response from the crowd fell. I watched people move to other parts of the festival site, where acts like 67 and Dave were performing. An attempted crowd call-back of "when I say Young, you say Money" mostly fell on deaf ears.

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By the time he played "A Milli" – which looked mildly enjoyable – I had ventured away from the main stage and toward other, happier areas of the site. What you don't see in that video is the first hour Wayne spent looking detached and slow, as though he'd somehow woken up from a deep nap to find himself on stage on Amsterdam against his will. Part of this came from the quality of sound, other parts came from the crowd being unable to efficiently react when presented with a near lo-fi headline performance, yet somewhere in the middle was Wayne – neither here nor there, rapping some lyrics but leaving others to the DJ, seemingly dialling in his performance before dotting back to a skatepark somewhere in Amsterdam that he'd reportedly hired for the next four days.

Bringing on the likes of Gudda Gudda and Mack Maine to perform a solo song each felt less like a surprise guest slot and more like a placeholder, filling space in the setlist. These songs weren't received as anything special by the crowd, whose muted response was telling. What should have been a celebration of one of the greatest living rappers today felt like a sad footnote, a totem to how rappers like Wayne are becoming less and less relevant in the face of some of the festival's more exciting acts. If nothing else, it depicted an artist who has been doing his thing for 20+ years, can look tired and often over it, yet also seems to be unable or unwilling to stop, having been working for so long.

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Photo by Isabel Janssen via PR

Wayne has been threatening his retirement for years now. In a 2009 interview with Tim Westwood he said he wanted his career to be over after he turned 30 – and definitely before he turns 35 (which is next month). Last year he tweeted about "being done" and "mentally defeated". Maybe he could write the odd guest verse, Andre 3000-like, as he did with Chance the Rapper's "No Problems", Tyler the Creator's "Smuckers" and Solange's "Mad" – songs that – standing alone – seemed to be a return to form, perhaps because each offered a unique bedrock or unchartered territory for Wayne to lend his talent to.

However, these songs aren't central to his solo career. So it's a struggle of sorts to see what pushes Wayne to continue trucking along. Watching him live was like watching a badly rendered YouTube video of another Wayne show – lacking in feeling, somehow disconnected from reality. Even worse was the stage's sound, as though 75 percent of Wayne's instrumentals had been illegally ripped using convert2mp3.net on the bus on the way to the show. In some cases it could be easy to blame the festival production team for the sound, but when the rest of Applesap was so great – and this is, truly, a stellar festival, better than any rap equivalent we have in the UK that I've been to – you can't help but feel as though something went specifically wrong with Wayne's setup.

In an extended 2014 interview with journalist Jeff Weiss, Lil Wayne is asked how he would like to be remembered – what he would like people to take away from him when he eventually releases Tha Carter V, rumoured to be his final project before that eventual retirement. Referring to his music, Wayne says "[I want people to know] that I live it. This isn't something that I do. This is who I am." It's a statement that certainly rang true for vast portions of his career, times he spent shining brighter than his contemporaries, making himself into an icon. Today, it's sad to see that light dimming under an ever darkening cloud. Wayne is still an immense talent. But in that particular setting on that night in Amsterdam, I walked away with other lines ringing in my head: shoulda, woulda, coulda.

You can find Ryan on Twitter.