On Saturday , March 22, I had the privilege of attending Tyler the Creator’s Chromakopia Tour at the Kia Center. I have loved his music since middle school and was so excited for him to go on tour. My friends thought it would be fine to just buy cheap seating in the back, which ended up spoiling the entire night.
Tyler had two stages he performed on— one being in the middle of the venue which we were able to clearly see. The second stage, however, was completely blocked by a big black bridge between the two stages as well as a large black box responsible for the lighting on the middle stage. The worst part of it all was that there was one single screen for people far away to be able to see what Tyler was doing up close and it was also at the front of the stage, so the people in the back couldn’t see that either.
As goes for the music, Tyler put on an amazing show with funny bits in between and a lot of crowd involvement. Although he is notorious for despising his own fans, he seemed to enjoy it when the whole crowd was singing along to his songs. He dove back into some of his older albums including “Goblin” and “CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST,” but the main focus of the concert was his new album Chromakopia.
Almost every song from this new album got its own full length performance, which is understandable yet a lot of his most popular songs like “She” were only played about halfway before getting cut off and moving on to his next song. I think concert culture has moved into expectations of 2-3 hour long concerts, so although it was reasonable to keep it at 1-2 hours, I was a little confused every time he would be getting to the best part of a song and then fade it out into his next song, which was the opposite story for his openers.
The openers for Tyler the Creator were Paris Texas and Lil Yachty. Before the concert, I had not heard of Paris Texas and although they brought great energy to the venue, I was not a big fan of their music. It was pretty loud, they had some metal-sounding mixes and just overall funky sounding music, and the band members seemed to be more focused on vibing than performing. Their setlist also seemed to stretch out into eternity. Lil Yachty was great though, he had a pretty long setlist and played all of his most popular songs, which I appreciate, like “A Cold Sunday” and “Drive ME Crazy.”
When the night was over, I was a little confused by the lack of attention for the people sitting in the back, the opener’s vibes compared to Tyler’s and the song lengths; but I am glad I finally got to see him in concert. Honestly, I would only recommend going if you can get good seating but the crowd had great energy and everyone seemed to create a good atmosphere.
