The crowd’s energy rarely faltered throughout the night. YoungBoy, on the other hand, approached the show with a quiet magnetism. He spent most of his set slowly pacing the stage, pulling from a blunt in between his fingers and occasionally rocking to the beat, as he did on early highlights like “Dangerous Love” and the dark groove of “Right Foot Creep.”
The set was split into three acts, each peppered with a near-equal amount of energetic rap songs and mellower melodic cuts and a few stage prop changes. The house on stage right eventually cracked open, revealing a living room inside occasionally rimmed with fire, and a platform that rose from the ground while he spit his verses from the Birdman collab “Black Ball.” YoungBoy only ever got as energetic as the song demanded, so joints like the trumpeting “Games of War” and the perpetually memed “Freeddawg” were electric, but friends, his backup dancers, and even a few onstage fans were the ones keeping the energy levels high.
Yes, like other MASA tour dates before it, this one had the kind of cartoonish aggression that’s gone viral. Several kids in my section stood and danced on top of their seats during “No Smoke,” with one getting so excited he accidentally punches me in the back of the head. One in a plain white tee who couldn’t have been older than 10 was doing imaginary money spreads to “Games of War” on the show floor. Every rap-heavy track turned the crowd into an impromptu cipher, green bandanas waving every which way.