Bossman Dlow. Photo by Amrin Prasad for Rolling Loud
After the show, Hurricane Wisdom’s manager leads me beneath the stage at Bogart’s in Cincinnati, OH. We find the 21-years-old-as-of-literally-tonight Florida rapper rolling up a joint with grabba as Bossman Dlow’s dancers and mascot flit in and out of adjacent greenrooms. Hurricane is wearing a thick-knit black beanie over his chest-length dreads, which frame a cluster of glinting necklaces slouched across his black Celine sweater; birthday balloons huddle in the corner of the room. “Every crowd ain’t gonna be too tee’d, [so] you just find your person that’s rocking with you,” he says of his current string of opening dates. “You can’t just be like ‘I don’t wanna do it anymore [laughs].’”
This affable, glass-half-full perspective seems honed by his previous stint opening for NoCap last year, and translated through his performance; though he arrived to the venue behind schedule, he seemed completely unphased by the initially restless crowd. Not that Hurricane Wisdom really has to worry about lukewarm audiences: when the first notes of “Need Me” hit, a woman behind me began screeching with the volume and repetition of a car alarm, and the venue seriously popped at the first notes of “Drugs Callin.” “Sometimes a lot of crowds don’t know who I am per se until they hear ‘Salute,’ or well, ‘Giannis,’” he admits with a wry smile after the show. “When they hear ‘Giannis’ it’s a whole different type of aura out that.”
Read Next: 1900Rugrat chose who he wanted to be
The crowd was already heated up a tad by 1900Rugrat, whose biggest hits (“Clean & Dirty,” “Cheat Codes,” and naturally, “One Take Freestyle”) offset the muted response to deeper cuts like “Dyin Bout Respect” with his brother Rickfrmdacreek. 1900’s set was early in the night — it’s a sold-out show, but the room won’t fill until shortly before Dlow takes the stage — but I also get a sense that his style might be a touch too aggro for a crowd whose average age seems to skew into the latter 20s.
The same wild-eyed quality that makes his spiky freestyles so magnetic might also make a jarring counterpart to Bossman Dlow’s bouncier approach, which feels a little smoother though still bombastic. I’d be curious to see how crowds are reacting to the hard nosed sound of DMV crank artist/crashout rapper Baby Kia at other stops on tour, just to get a sense of whether audience familiarity can offset that sonic mismatch. Regardless, 1900 didn’t phone it in, and his stage presence has definitely improved from his first performances (all of six months ago). He’s rapping most of the words over the backing track, turning his chest to the audience so we can see his face (though he’s often rendered a dark silhouette by the super-bright VFX behind him). He’s still lacking a bit when it comes to crowd work, but that’s not much of a complaint when you’re opening for the opener.
I caught 1900 Rugrat, Hurricane Wisdom, and Bossman Dlow at Rolling Loud Cali a few weeks ago; by comparison, the crowd here in Cincinnati was not only less enthusiastic all around, but frankly, puny for Dlow in particular. Live performances are a feedback loop between artists and audiences, and here that cycle felt understandably disjointed. Festival crowds are self-selecting, so the openers having a harder time made sense, but I was surprised by how uneven the reactions to Dlow could be; it seems counterintuitive that an artist with multiple good albums in 2024 could sell out a show and only attract singles fans.
Then again, those singles are beyond undeniable, and part of a tour’s purpose is converting casual listeners into diehards. The crowd here was as enthusiastic rapping along to every word of “Get In With Me” as Nationwide Arena in Columbus was last summer on the Sexyy Red tour, and when Dlow carefully made the rounds through the front of GA, glad-handing like a politician on the trail, people were ecstatic. His crowd work onstage was solid too, like when he demanded everyone “with some motion” get their phone flashlights in the air, or attempted to matchmake the crowd en masse before launching into twerk anthem “Come Here.”
These moments were great, and honestly left me wishing he would press the obvious buttons a little bit more. Nobody expects a no-holds-barred performance at a mid-size tour stop, but Dlow’s highs are so high it seems obvious he can do more to convince people to shell out for the $65 hoodies and $100 meet and greet tickets without busting his ass. That might honestly just boil down to hamming it up a little more: if you’re going to the effort of wearing a University of Cincinnati jersey (his female backup dancers all match) for hometown love, you can definitely demand we rap along to your lyrics more and run the hits back a couple times.
Still, I left more than satisfied, elated to hear a packed show yell every syllable of the hook to “Mo Chicken” a cappella. The venue was thoroughly hotboxed to the point security guards out by the patio commented on the haze, and when Dlow hopped into the crowd to perform “Talk My Shit,” everyone predictably lost their minds. My favorite song of the night was probably “2 Slippery” by Luh Tyler, which Dlow rapped with his arm around his mascot (an oversized grey bulldog, as yet unnamed), bobbing side to side as the LCD screen strobed behind them. You would have thought they just won a championship.
