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Lil’ Wayne is the most dynamic musical act I have ever seen. I think that would be the best starting point to this post, as I have never seen one person captivate an audience the way Lil’ Wayne did in Winston-Salem on Saturday. Seeing Lil’ Wayne in 2008 is as close as one can get to seeing James Brown in his prime, because the experience far surpasses the music (the songs are pretty good too however).

Just to set the stage, I was in Winston-Salem to see a friend that had been working on the Barack Obama Campaign in North Carolina and I lucked out that Weezy’s visit to W-S coincided with mine (many more posts forthcoming on Winston-Salem itself and politics). The concert was held at the arena at Wake Forest and the crowd was split pretty evenly between white prepster Wake students and black students from both Wake and Winston-Salem State.

Gates opened at 7 pm, but after reading several places that Wayne does not normally go on before 10 pm (and is often much later than that), my friend and I showed up at 9 so that we wouldn’t be completely ear-shot by the time he performed. Nine and Ten p.m. passed and it was well past eleven before Lil’ Wayne was even known to be in the building (equally likely that he had just spent the night in his dressing room, smoking marijuana until 11:15 pm).

By the time Wayne made his stage appearance, the crowd had already twice gone through “We Want Wayne!” chants and had grown tired of the Emcees’ reminders that there would be two concert after parties in downtown Winston-Salem.

11:13 p.m. Enter Weezy.

The ravenous Carolina crowd went absolutely bananas for his entrance. He came with a posse, but unlike many rappers, Wayne’s entourage did little else but hold the rapper’s personal effects as he decided to take them off during the show; no mics or bottles of Cristal amongst these hangers-on.

The set list featured all the favorites (Go DJ, Fireman, King Kong, Lollipop, etc.) and a few other tracks once he was joined by Baby towards the end of the show, but the most of the shows best moments had nothing to do with the music.

Wayne set the attitude of the night with this simple mantra:
“I believe in three things; 1) I believe in God, 2) Without y’all (the crowd) I ain’t shit and 3) Without y’all, I aint’ shit.”

From there on out, Lil’ Wayne was the man that every guy in attendance wanted to be and every girl in the audience wanted to be with. During some of the more provocative lyrics, girls in the audience seem to come near climax.

Wayne’s braggadocio was not only limited to the microphone, but extended to the guitar, on which he played some of the most brash awful sounding guitar I have ever heard.

The bottom line with Lil’ Wayne is that seeing him live is watching performance artistry, because

Enclosed are actual video clips from the performance, which capture some of the best of Wayne on stage.