Past disorganised queues of hundreds of people trying to gain access to Lil Wayne’s set at the VIP Room’s “Pop Up” venue, and subsequent tabloid stories about the rapper’s “double cup” indulgences, it would be easy to forget that the man born Dwayne Michael Carter Jr has some serious verbal skills – whatever hip-hop purists might haughtily tell you.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, his UAE debut, in a ballroom above the VIP Room’s normal club space, wasn’t the ideal showcase for such dexterity – particularly when half of the massed ranked were more intent on taking selfies with the New Orleans-born chart-topper performing in the background than actually engaging with his short set.
The main event was done and dusted inside 30 minutes, after a significant build-up that featured backing dancers and an excitable MC riling the crowd up into a mild frenzy, while Weezy himself milled around next to the stage. But he packed in a decent amount of material from a career that has thus far gleaned three No 1 albums and a No 1 single in his homeland.
The latter hit, Lollipop, was preceded by A Milli, another unit-shifting single from his 2008 album Tha Carter III. His white T-shirt and slightly comical oversized hat – not exactly dispelling any jibes about his statute – both came off as he kicked in to A Milli, displaying his heavily tattooed torso.
The two other most-recognisable tunes almost took the shine off Wayne's status as one of the world's top hip-hop figureheads: there was nothing wrong per se with energetic performances of Truffle Butter (by Nicki Minaj) or Loyal (by Chris Brown), apart from the fact he could surely have dropped a couple of his own tunes in the place of club hits that he merely cameos in.
Not that the crowd seemed to care: the reception was rarely less than ravenous. With luck, perhaps Lil Wayne will return for a full live set in the near future to demonstrate what he can really do.
aworkman@thenational.ae
