Ben Allen
Wednesday night saw Tkay Maidza take the Entry by storm along with her DJ and a room full of bouncing souls.
In terms of genre, Tkay exists in this happy intersection of electronic, pop, and hip-hop, and the crowd makeup and their behavior reflected that. In my experience, hip-hop crowds are a little more vocal than others, particularly electronic crowds.
It makes sense, considering the music is built around the voice and the dialogue with the listener. And even if there wasn’t a hip-hop element in a particular song, the energy carried over from song to song. She got the crowd in a frenzy at a couple of points.
It also helped that she brought DJ Pia along to keep everybody on their toes with near-constant direction. “Dance! Hands up! Jump, jump!” I’ll admit that it doesn’t look great in writing, but in practice, it worked, and it wasn’t obnoxious. I think it also helped that Pia wasn’t afraid to get out from behind the mixing table to shake her thing and show everybody how it’s done.
Minneapolis is the fifth of her 19 stop tour supporting her new album, Sweet Justice, released late last year. Some artists may suffer from a sophomore slump, but I don’t see any of that present here.
She made good use of her time. The show was an hour-long rapid-fire tour de force of her catalog, and she made it through quite a bit. Between songs, she lamented the abbreviated set time, saying she wished she could play more. From the sound of it, she was not the one calling the shots for the set times.
I’ve been waiting since 2016 to see Tkay live. Minnesota is a long, long way from Australia, so they will really want to come here. It was absolutely worth the wait and I’d highly recommend the people in the next 14 stops to catch Tkay while she’s stateside.
(Also, shout out to George Maple for turning me on to Tkay way back when!)
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