Even the ridiculous downtown traffic and $40 parking lots couldn’t kill my vibe. Megan Thee Stallion’s Hot Girl Summer Tour is here and she’s made her way to Little Caesars arena. With GloRilla in tow as the opening act, Thee Stallion’s Saturday night Detroit pit stop included a few only-in-Detroit surprises, a high-energy performance, and all the ass-shaking we could have hoped for.
The excitement for Thee Stallion seemed to permeate the entire downtown as hotties strutted down Woodward Avenue dressed in as little as possible. A girl with a red vinyl peplum top, a heart-shaped cut out on her chest, leads her crew towards LCA strolling in front of cars packed with booty-short-clad women and slicked-back ponytails. Women of all sizes show their bellies and buttcheeks peek out under kneecap-length weaves. This may be the fliest group of concertgoers I’ve ever seen.
Inside GloRilla calls out, “Where my ratchet bitches at?? Y’all ready to get ratchet in this motherfucker??” The crowd has been ready, but the Memphis-born rapper’s muted energy doesn’t quite match up to their excitement. Dressed in cropped and bedazzled yellow flannel and what look like Hot Topic Tripp pants, GloRilla delivers an understated performance.
It’s one thing to make a catchy song in the studio, but to fill an entire arena like LCA with a show is another skill that she seems to have not quite developed. Her dancers make the show with their choreography (their knees deserve a medal) while GloRilla seems to fade into the background. The bass is way too loud, pumping straight into my chest and making it hard to make out when GloRilla is actually rapping against the background track. Her dancing feels uncommitted like she barely wants to do it in the first place.
The crowd doesn’t seem to mind as it’s hard to have a bad time when you’re overtaken by the excitement of getting ratchet on a 70-degree spring night. Glo tells us how much the crowd’s energy is giving her life, and how she loves Detroit music before bringing out hometown faves Peezy and then Skilla Baby to perform one song each.
When Megan Thee Stallion comes out by herself to “HISS,” it’s clear she doesn’t need backup dancers or a hype man to light up the stage. She bounces up and down, sways back and forth and hypes up the crowd, her oversized wig jumping with her. It’s giving twerking Diana Ross as a rock band frontwoman.
The mic is on. Her energy is on 100. And you don’t want to take your eyes off her even after she’s joined by the backup dancers. Her bedazzled bodysuit is covered in a snakeskin pattern. Her next outfit— the second of three — is a Barbie pink fringed piece like a sexy competitive ice skater would wear with matching gogo boots. Her last is another sheer bodysuit, this time brown with a wetlook corset.
She’s been in her serpentine goddess energy lately and gives us all the snake-themed tracks — “Cobra,” “Boa,” “HISS” — backed up by visuals of glowing red, a projection of her as Medusa, cobras, and tunnels of scales that seem never ending.
“Hey friend,” she says to a fan in the pit as she struts by and waves.
Meg has always been in her bad bitch era but now she’s shed the lingering skin of drama, trauma, and the public humiliation of both being assaulted and having her credibility picked apart. The last fuck she had to give has slothed off and shriveled and she emerges from the floor in a crystal chrysalis for “Plan B.”
In her 2020 track “Captain Hook,” Meg told us she’s “a rapper not no motherfucking model,” and tonight she reminds us that she’s not just a rapper — she’s a dancer and performer with a stage presence as big as her ass.
She dances so hard you can see the sweat drip down her neck. Sometimes she jumps up and down, dances, and raps all at the same time. She’s putting on a show but also reveling in herself as she takes fans’ phones and records videos of her shaking her ass. It is a sight to behold.
After owning the stage for over an hour, Megan Thee Stallion ends appropriately with “Savage” (the Beyoncé remix) which gives her time to bust it down, drop into the splits, and twerk on the ground during Bey’s part.
A mob of women take over a men’s bathroom at LCA because the line for the women’s was too long. Shoutout to the guy who took a group pic of us and sorry, not sorry, to any of the men who felt uncomfortable using the urinal with a group of screaming women watching.
Welcome to the hot girl summer.
