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Lil Wayne performs at Jiffy Lube Live in Bristow, Virginia on Thursday night. (Josh Sisk / for the Washington Post)
When you realize that you want to spend the rest of your life doing something else, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible. This could explain what happened to Lil Wayne on Thursday night at Jiffy Lube Live, where a man once considered the greatest living rapper asked the crowd for forgiveness, played about a fifth of the songs he had played the night before , finished his tour and left the band. step.
Was it for the night or the tour? At the time, it was a mystery.
Let's see how we got here. Twenty years ago, in a distant musical landscape, two of the biggest bands to break through were Lil Wayne, a teenager, and Blink-182, a twenty-year-old group trying their best to look like teenagers.
As Blink and Wayne grew older, they experienced ups and downs at different times, but their career has now crossed, in 2019, into a trough that took the form of a top-flight tour. ; displays.
Thursday's bill promised a nostalgic pleasure: an opportunity to revisit Blink's entire "Enema of the State" and catch a shooting star whose former teenagers in the crowd may remember as the one of the brightest lights of hip-hop.
But quickly, it became clear that no one on stage was having fun.
Wayne started the first and the Woodstock '99 nightmare woke up when his band turned a handful of hits into rap-rock assaults. He had already tried this on his rock-based "Rebirth" in 2010, but the 36-year-old rapper seemed now exhausted by the uneven decade that followed.
He confessed he was not used to playing such shows. The crowd was "not my booty," he said. The rapper thanked Blink for bringing him with him, but admitted, "It may be my last night."
Some disappointed Weezy fans groaned and groaned, and a few took the outings, but most of the audience shrugged – just like Wayne himself, a day later, on Twitter. "Yesterday was krazy!" he tweeted Friday. "But I want all my fans to know that I will not leave this tour! I'm having too much fun with my blink-182 brothers. "
His brothers Blink-182 – bassist Mark Hoppus, drummer Travis Barker and guitarist Matt Skiba, replacing since founding member, Tom Delonge, left the group in search of aliens a few years ago – have followed Weezy's untimely exit with some tiresome antics along the roads of their own.
They went through the movements of "Enema", an album whose sophomoric juvenalia was already tired when it was released. At the time, the band seemed at least to be in the joke. The premise of "How old is he?"
In the middle of the series, Hoppus explained that they would play more songs "because we are contractually obliged".
Blink-182, never enough punk for true punk, had become his antithesis: the ex-jocks who wander around the school remembering their past glory. In front of giant support amps, Hoppus and Skiba exchanged the microphone and rummaged through their parts, stifled by the sound system of the amphitheater in a way that their pristine records had never been. Barker remains a virtuoso drummer, but his machine gun flights have no target.
It's never been as clear as his Tommy Lee- "American Gladiators" drums solo. Barker attached to the dubstep cacophony for four minutes. Appropriately, he realized this self-gratifying fantasy alone while Hoppus held his breath and Skiba adjusted his fedora.
Blink closed the evening with "Dammit", performing their best song with a hint of nostalgia: Hoppus pressed the chorus of TLC's "No Scrubs". The crowd seemed to enjoy it but did not seem too bright. After all, nostalgia – whether for "The Lion King", "Friends" or White Hegemony – is so at the moment.
We can do better. Even Blink-182 knows it. They sang much earlier in the night: "Do not let your future be destroyed by my past."
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