Arts Cultural Response: Wiz Khalifa concert

I have only been to once concert before I attended the Wiz Khalifa concert, which was a Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw concert in Met life stadium. For those of you that don’t know Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw are two very illustrious country artists, so attending a Hip Hop concert was a whole new experience for me. And needless to say this experience was amazing!

The concert started at 7:30 and ended at midnight on Friday October 12 in the Bryce Jordan Center. The BJC is a colossal place, so even though there were a couple thousand people their it didn’t seem like that much because of the size of the BJC. Since Wiz Khalifa is notorious for smoking lots of weed, the majority of the people at the concert were stoned out of their mind.

The opening act was performed by Juicy J for about 40 minutes. I had never heard of Juicy J before, but I had really high expectations for him. Truth be told I did not enjoy Juicy J as I found that his music was too hardcore rap with no real catchy melody. I did feel a little sorry for him though because at one point the majority of the crowd started to boo him.

Chevy Woods came out for the second act and I was much more familiar with his music. He was very enthusiastic and he got the crowd very energetic, but we all just wanted to see Wiz come out so people started to get very antsy. Chevy did perform one of his songs with Juicy J, so that was pretty interesting to see.

The final act was obviously Wiz Khalifa. As soon as he walked on stage you could see basically everyone start lighting up their hidden “J’s.” As the room started to fill up with the marijuana smoke; Wiz Khalifa in a rocker/hip hop star outfit began to jump and start off the real part of the night. He ended up singing a lot of songs from his new album, and although it felt very exclusive to be hearing songs that weren't available to the general public, it would have been a lot better if he had played his more well-known songs, as no one knew the lyrics. I find that the “fun” aspect of concerts is to be able to sing along with the artist, and when you don’t know the lyrics, the situation can get pretty awkward. But the great guy that Wiz is, he performed his most famous songs, and when “Black and Yellow” came on the entire place erupted. There were mini fireworks being set off, as well as correlating black and yellow lights being flashed all over the crowd.

Being that I had only been to one concert I was constantly comparing both concerts. In retrospect probably not the most accurate comparisons I could have made since the two genres are so different thus one could only expect the performances of each artist to be so different. But I found that especially during the tailgate/pregame to these concerts the country concert relied more on drinking while the Hip Hop concert revolved around drugs.

I really enjoyed going to the concert with my friends and listening to some great music. It was an experience that I will never forget. I would definitely go back and see another Wiz concert, and I actually heard that he will be performing with Mac Miller in the spring, who is another favorite artist of mine.