A couple of weeks ago, T-Pain put on Wiscansin Fest featuring a huge lineup of acts that took over The Rave in Milwaukee. It was the kick off to his Escape from Wiscansin: The Invasion Tour, a more synthesized version of the fest. The sci-fi inspired tour made a stop at Riviera theater last week and while I expected a party atmosphere for this sort of show to be fun, little did I know just how entertaining and nonstop the whole night would be.
Well before the official show kicked off, DJ sets were blaring as loud as I've ever heard them at Riviera. Seemingly, the party started as soon as the doors opened and never truly stopped. In fact it was almost hard to determine when the DJ sets ended and the performances starts. Young Cash for example came on to the stage right in the middle of one of the track and just dived into his set. With a driving flow and intense stage presence, he mad the most of his short set.
NandoSTL came on next with a similar energy, but with an added dose of playfulness between the intensity that really elevated his time on stage, The St Louis Rapper, as his name alludes to, has an boisterous energy that the crowd fed right into. Nando dashed round the stage alongside a hype man or two, jamming out and often air guitaring to the solid beats before letting his flow lose on tracks like "Loud". His songs are as catchy as they are explosive, keeping the crowd intrigued throughout.
Nando has a ton of charisma, easily using to get the already eager crowd on his side as he jumped off stage and stood on the barricade. It felt like the audience just gravitated toward him, embracing him as he dropped bar after bar. Coming off his track "Y.O.T.A." which features Young Cash and T-Pain, NandoSTL feels destined to keep making a big mark on hip hop scene.
Tobi Lou followed that with a fantastic performance of his own. Donning an evocative outfit that included a sleeveless puffy coat, the Nigerian born Chicagoan blasted through his set with the exact ferocity that I hoped for. Tobi Lou is a consummate performer that had the crowd mesmerized with precise moves and immaculate flow.
With the crowd warmed up and ready to go, it was finally time for the main event. The lights dimmed and the evening's alien theme hit the ground running. David Bowie's "Space Oddity" rang out as the screen onstage played spaceship CGI traveling through outer space, slowly building up to a crescendo. The lights blacked out for a moment before T-Pain and his DJ appeared atop the platform on stage. The moment was met with roars from the crowd that surely pushed the nights energy into overload.
Despite the crowd enthusiasm, T-Pain did make mention of how he was worried about this Chicago, noting that the sales numbers were low for a while. Taking a look around the jam packed Riviera, it was obvious that those worries were unfounded in the end and T-Pain wasn't going to let that reality go unrewarded.
The whole evening was just wall to wall bangers as T-Pain's output during the the late 2000s was chock full of. The whole show felt like a nonstop medley of tracks, leaving no time for the crowd to rest. If you weren't dancing your ass off to "Booty Wurk (One Cheek at a Time)", then surely a few songs later something like "I'm Sprung" or "Bartender would suffice. There were so many recognizable songs that when "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)" hit in the middle of the set, I overheard several groups of people question "How's he going to end the show then?"
The answer was a string of even more covers, songs he's featured in. Of course the highlight of the night was T-Pain belting out his cover of Black Sabbath's "Warpigs" with all the gusto you could hope for. There was genuinely something for everyone to enjoy during Escape from Wiscansin: The Invasion tour and as the exhausted crowd emptied out of the Riviera, you could tell they would have powered through for more and more from the master of the party anthem T-Painn.
All photos by Julian Ramirez