It doesn’t take a whole lot to get a roomful of college-aged EDM junkies moving, but Baauer gave it his all anyway during his Thursday night show at the 9:30 Club.
For both the “Harlem Shake” producer and SoundCloud favorite Graves, whose high-energy opening set easily could have headlined a smaller show, the bustling, bouncing crowd must have looked like an IRL sampling of the Internet fan bases who have catapulted their careers into the upper troposphere. The members of the young, largely male audience bore all the signs of Internet fandom: Yung Lean T-shirts, Riff Raff hoodies and, of course, Bape anything and everything.
The floor of the 9:30 Club began to slowly fill up during Graves’ opening set, but there was nothing slow about his performance. The Hawaii-based producer spun a fast and furious selection of SoundCloud hits from eclectic producers such as Mr. Carmack and Mura Masa. But the biggest successes of his set proved to be his own songs — tracks such as “Tiger Blood,” featuring MYRNE, and the ASKA collaboration “There Are No Penguins in Alaska” flattened the constantly growing crowd of fans with his signature combination of future-bass synths and hip-hop swagger.
His own music wasn’t the only place rap showed up; some of Graves’ best transitions of the night involved tracks from some of hip-hop’s hottest artists. Young Thug, Drake and Fetty Wap all got play from the producer, but perhaps the night’s biggest crowd reaction came in the form of an impromptu sing-along to Future’s “Thought It Was a Drought.”
“I just fucked your bitch in some Gucci flip-flops,” the crowd screamed enthusiastically.
While Graves’ quick transitions into off-kilter, bass-heavy drops inspired many “oohs” from the impressed crowd, by the time Baauer took the stage after midnight, the energy was at a peak. When the producer (clad in a custom Aa jacket) ran out to album opener “Church,” the excited cheers were only overshadowed by the crazed flailing and jumping when “GoGo!,” the biggest trap banger on his recently released album Aa, blared over the sound system.
In fact, “GoGo!” inspired such enthusiasm that Baauer played it again later in the night along with a number of other album cuts, including star-studded bangers like the M.I.A.-featuring “Temple” and Pusha T and Future’s traphouse anthem “Kung Fu.” And if those songs didn’t accurately capture Baauer’s love of collaboration, the appearance of Baltimore emcee TT The Artist for a performance of the Aa joint effort “Make it Bang” (which did exactly what the title suggests), made it abundantly clear. Baauer appeared to be genuinely enjoying himself as he watched the blue-haired rapper hype up the already simmering audience.
When he wasn’t playing songs from his album in what seemed like well-deserved celebration, Baauer’s showed off his DJing abilities and played a set that ranged virtually every electronic genre, from big-room house and festival trap to Jersey club and hip-hop. The tempo changed more than the location of his towel, which spent time on the table, his neck, his head and more.
If Baauer’s performance had a fault, it’s that it was tiring: The show didn’t dip in energy for its entirety. So when he broke into the final half hour, which boasted recent rap hits such as “Antidote” and “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 2” — songs that usually inspire the head-nodding and jumping that had already been occurring for an hour — the audience had begun to lag a little, clearly exhausted by a Thursday night with a foot firmly planted on the gas.
But they eased off the brake when, after a sudden ending that fooled no one, Baauer returned to the stage to perform the song he once called “my creep (acoustic)” on Twitter.
“I don’t usually play this one,” he fibbed before launching into his meme-ified 2012 viral hit “Harlem Shake.”
But the Internet’s love of memes came full circle when the crowd, ready for the iconic drop in “Harlem Shake”, was instead met with Spandau Ballet’s “True.” Because he who lives by the meme ends with the meme.
CORRECTION: Due to a reporting error, a previous version of this story incorrectly named Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” as the last song in Baauer’s set. It was Spandau Ballet’s “True.” This story has been updated.
