Words by Gabriel Spadaccini, image by Tristan Stefan Edouard
Fans packed into The Metro Theatre for G Eazy, marking a sold out show for the West Coast emcee on his latest Sydney visit. Touring in support of his album When It’s Dark Out, G-Eazy’s recent show built upon his slick aesthetic with an impressively cohesive performance.
Melbourne-based emcee Nico Ghost opened the night, placing lyrics on introspection side-by-side with party anthems – which sometimes felt a little misplaced. While he delivered a set that was intimate and honest, you got the feeling that the crowd was preoccupied with G-Eazy’s incoming arrival. Accordingly, the half hour gap before G-Eazy strode onstage seemed to go on forever. Fans in the audience craned around smartphones showing the rapper’s Snapchat Story – a video panorama of the crowd, taken from the wings of the stage. Pressing closer to the front, we watched G’s tour crew, at an almost tauntingly slow pace, tape the set list to the stage. Rolling, football stadium-esque chants of “Ger-ald, Ger-ald” bubbled up from the crowd every few minutes before subsiding into chatter.
Finally, G-Eazy stepped onstage to the ominous opening notes of ‘Random’. The Bay Area rapper’s set consisted mostly of songs from his latest album, flowing through tracks like ‘Of All Things,’ ‘Some Kind of Drug’, and ‘Calm Down’, the last of which he ran through twice because it hyped the crowd up so much. In between songs he would begin what sounded at first like a casual conversation with the audience, reflections that seemed natural (“There weren’t this many people in the crowd last time I came to Sydney”) until you realised they were an elaborate setup for a punch-line, often a song title or hook (“But I suppose we could always… ‘Order More”). Cue the sly grin, as if to ask “Wasn’t that clever?” – and the bass dropped in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UI9WCl4Cd8E
Hits like ‘I Mean It’, ‘Tumblr Girls’, and ‘Let’s Get Lost’ from 2014’s These Things Happen also found their way onto the setlist, but fans hoping for Endless Summer mixtape-era G-Eazy were out of luck. Halfway through the show he mentioned a cut from the independently released Must Be Nice – only about 4 years old – as if it was from another generation. And maybe it was. The ensuing question of “Do we have any Day One fans in the building?!” was at first greeted with only a handful of shouts, as if it made the audience of overwhelmingly university-age white kids hesitate for a moment. But understandably so: To be a true Day One G-Eazy fan you’d have to have been listening to him back when he released The Tipping Point in 2007 – a wholly different artist and a much less tailored persona. No slicked back undercut with the perfectly-faded sides, no leather jacket, no small throng of (mostly) model-gorgeous girls fawning over him from the sides of the stage. Not nearly the G-Eazy we know and love today.
Arguably the most interesting aspect of G’s set was hearing the unique outcome of brazenly combining traditional hip-hop instrumentals with the human touch of a live drummer, one Blake ‘Blizzy’ Robinson. One gets the feeling Robinson, clearly an adept and creative percussionist, is caged-in during the performance, respectfully playing within the pre-set instrumentals. Fortunately, there were a few moments when he was able to let loose. When G decided to spit his verse on the DJ Carnage-produced banger ‘I Like Tuh’, you could tell by the smile on Robinson’s face that he was having a blast by making as much noise as possible.
Despite the short set, fans were rabid enough to enjoy every minute. It comes as no surprise – When It’s Dark Out contains some of his best verses to date, dramatic, polished instrumentals, and some fairly exceptional pop songwriting. Although the majority of monologues between these songs seemed scripted, there were a few much-needed flashes of realness, like when the 26-year old artist proudly told the crowd how appreciative he was to have a fanbase nearly 7500 miles away from his home in California. The few brief instances when, mic dangling from one arm, he looked out on the crowd in silence, bonafide grin slowly stretching across his face as he listened to the applause after a song, were ultimately the high points of his performance. For those few moments, G-Eazy was in awe of his fans just as much as they were in awe of him.
