TUESDAY
PAGE 9
november 12, 2013
the daily orange
the sweet stuff in the middle
‘THIS IS THE MOMENT’ MACKLEMORE FROM PAGE 1
who don’t know,” the rapper said as a set-closing reintroduction. Taking the stage bathed in blue lights, Brooklyn mainstay Talib Kweli didn’t fare much better in captivating the crowd. Kweli deferred his choruses to prerecorded vocals blasting from the PA system, refused point blank to rap about weed (“This is a family show, this is a private college,” he said) and covered the Beatles’ staple “Eleanor Rigby” midway through his set. But some crowd members still found that wanting to dance along anyway was, well, the best reason to keep on dancing. “I didn’t know who that was,” Lilikas said, “But we just wanted to dance, and we did.” After the crowd awaited the headliner with an anticipatory hush between sets, Macklemore came onstage and flaunted a Syracuse basketball jersey emblazoned with his name, and the audience proved they didn’t need music to dance. Macklemore pointed out an errant crowd surfer also sporting a basketball jersey. “We have just elected a new student body president here in Syracuse, and it is that guy right there,” Macklemore said jokingly. With his longtime music-making partner Ryan Lewis spinning beats and rallying the crowd from up high, elevated from the rest of the stage, Macklemore wove between regaling larger-than-life stories and rapping hits at breakneck speeds. While the rapper rambled through fictitious yarns as prologues to some of his biggest hits — his introduction to “Thrift Shop” was a meandering throwaway joke involving skinny-dipping in Onondaga Lake and putting on his iconic fur coat — Macklemore didn’t shy away from including more socially conscious songs in his set. “I’m surprised they got Macklemore,” said Rachel Heyman, a sophomore music education major. “He’s more alternative than what they’d usually bring.” Preaching the importance of forward thinking and bringing noticeably emotional singer Mary Lambert to sing the song’s hook, Macklemore got the audience swaying tenderly to “Same Love.” He tugged at heartstrings again later in the set, spotlighting his string section on “Wing$.” And they cried. Well, maybe the
MACKLEMORE points to a crowd-surfing fan wearing a Seattle Supersonics jersey from the rapper’s hometown, saying the audience member should be elected student body president. The rapper performed a long set list to a sold-out crowd and returned for several encores.
RYAN LEWIS returns from dancing on stage and raises his hands during the second song of Macklemore’s set, “Life is Cinema.”
BIG K.R.I.T., a rapper hailing from Mississipi, performs in front of his yellow DJ stand, which is made to look like the hood of a Cadillac.
waterworks weren’t actually visible, but the sentiment sweeping from the stage was palpable. But Macklemore played most of his set for laughs. He made a quick costume change into a matador’s suit of lights, mirroring his music video for “White Walls.” He bluffed a story about being best friends with Leonardo DiCaprio and Snoop Dogg in a convoluted lead-up to the smash hit “Can’t Hold Us.” The rapper beatboxed his way through a freestyle, only after making the audience promise to keep
Under the guise of his faux-British moniker, an outlandish Ziggy Stardust wig and a fur-tufted rainbow of a cape he wore over his jersey, Macklemore unleashed his persona in a glitter-spangled rendition of “And We Danced.” The crowd danced along in a flurry of streamers and glitter, shot out from cannons. Again departing from the stage — this time for a much-needed switch from his Bowie getup to a navy blue No. 44 football jersey — Macklemore returned in brilliant orange and green for a second encore, “Irish Cel-
the performance off YouTube if he flubbed his rhymes. “You bastards,” he said jokingly when he caught sight of students clamoring for their phones to film the performance. And they laughed. Borrowing from the rock star playbook, Macklemore split from the stage after “Wing$” to an encore that started seconds after the lights dimmed. But after an introduction video announced the artist’s next stage persona, he reappeared as his flamboyant alter ego Raven Bowie.
ebration,” crescendoing in a blast of confetti. It flurried like Syracuse snowfall, hanging suspended in the air for most of the song. Macklemore recycled “Can’t Hold Us” to close out his encore. And despite having demanded the crowd to prove their energy during the first iteration of the song, the crowd danced just as frenetically during the repeat performance. And they had a really, really, really good time. ervanrhe@syr.edu @TheRealVandyMan