330 Ritch – San Francisco
Live Review: 6/23/09
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Last night, Wale was in San Francisco for a show at an intimate little bar venue known as 330 Ritch.  Tickets were $10 presale, and Wale was the only act on the bill.  Sounds like a dream concert, right?  Wrong.  After 3 hours of DJ warm-up sets, Wale finally showed at 1am, and went on to play the shortest set in concert history at just about 20 minutes.

I’ve been drinking the Wale Kool Aid for about a year now, and my fandom only grew when he released his latest collab with 9th Wonder, which is very much on point.  He rhymes well, loves Seinfeld, and sounds pretty humble on his mixtape confessional skits.  What’s not to like?

His new single has some heat, the 9th tape is hot, and he was solo on the bill, which had me thinking he’d probably spaz-out Kanye style up there.

Instead, he mailed it in. Not even email — regular ol’ snail mail with a stamp.

As the video shows, he was up there, he spit his verses, but there definitely wasn’t anything special going on.  I actually think he only finished two whole songs, one of which is featured here, and the other was Elevators, which is hardly his best song.  And, why is his hype man lip-singing Gaga’s chorus?

For some reason, I thought it’d be similar to the Q-tip/Cool Kids show I saw that was only a quarter full where tip rocked it for over an hour.  He even let people rap the lyrics to Electric Relaxation on the mic — he shut Phoenix, Arizona down, which is saying a lot because not many artists care to even rock a packed show in Arizona.  However, this was San Francisco and a venue that Miike Snow killed last week.

Maybe he was tired?  Maybe he was sick?  Maybe he got the address wrong?  Maybe he just thinks our attention spans are short?  I don’t know.  But, I’m definitely thinking of switching Kool-Aid flavors.  And, from the looks of my twitter search, so is at least one other person, DexIsDope, who said: “Went to 330 ritch last night in the city. Seen Wale perform and kinda sucked. No stage presense and was only there for 20 min.”

Thanks to 330 Ritch for bringing him out, the guy who shot the vid and to the DJ’s for doing their best to keep things live all for 3 hours. Such is life. Strikes and gutters, ups and downs…I guess you get what you pay for.