American rapper, Future was in Nigeria for his ‘Future Live In Lagos’ concert and it was a premium event. I’m not talking about the show itself, I’m talking about the tickets for the show. Regular tickets cost as high as 50,000 naira and VIP tickets cost 100,000 naira each. Don’t get me started on how much VVIP and table tickets cost.
The ticket prices should already give you an idea of the type of crowd to expect at this concert and they didn’t disappoint. It was a good idea to have sold the tickets for the show at that rate. It made it possible to limit the kind and size of people that made it to the show. The audience consisted mostly of the more privileged kids in society and people of higher financial status than the regular Nigerian.
However, all the fights at the concert did not exactly scream class, it mostly reeked of privilege and spoilt child syndrome. The organisers did not do a good job putting the event together either because the concert was mediocre at best. Perhaps, the most impressive thing that happened at the concert was Future’s less than 2-hour performance and Rema’s surprise performance.
The event started at about 11:45 pm with performances from upcoming artists and a few breakout stars performing a few of their songs. Some of the more memorable performances of the night were Good Girl LA, Pepenazi, Crayon, Alternative Sound and Dr Sid. After these performances ended at about 1 am, Dotun (DO2DTUN) came up to hype the crowd. This didn’t work out as the organisers may have expected because the audience members didn’t appear to be hyped in any way. They may have had a fighting chance if they had paired Dotun with DJ Spinall instead of DJ Consequence or if Dotun had found a way to connect with the crowd.
Then there was a one hour gap where nothing happened at the concert and the DJ played poorly arranged boring music. The concert was literally dead for one hour, nothing was happening and nobody gave any reasons for the lack of activities. In that time, a fight broke out at the VVIP session with punches being thrown and someone attacking another person with a bottle. To put this lightly, it was messy.
The show only started to make sense when Future took the stage around 2:15 am performing his hit collaboration with Ace Hood and Rick Ross, “Bugatti”. Future’s performance was energetic and fire from the beginning to the end. However, there was a shocking moment when a fan jumped on stage to hug Future and he received a punch from Future for his enthusiasm. He was then pushed off the stage by the bouncers on stage.
The highlight of the show for me was when Future invited his only guest for the night, Rema on stage to perform. Rema quickly performed “Dumebi” and “Lady”, making the crowd very excited, so much so, they sang along with him throughout his performance. After Rema exited the stage, Future performed for a few minutes more and ended the event with his song, “Incredible”.
The event all together was poorly done. More thought should have been put into coordinating the whole show. More importantly, considering the amount of money fans had to dole out for the show, there should have been more performances from prominent artists. They hopefully learned a ton of lessons from this event and will do better next time.
