Most pop stars are minted through trial by fire: are you really an A-lister if you haven’t weathered some kind of scandal, tragedy or faux-cancellation? Even by those standards, though, Megan Thee Stallion has had a hell of a few years. After shooting to fame in 2019 with a string of singles that brandished her southern bona fides as she rose to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100, the Houston rapper became a genuine star in 2020 with two singles – the Beyoncé-featuring TikTok hit Savage and the inescapable, conservative-enraging Cardi B collaboration WAP – that peaked at the top spot.
The same year, she filed a temporary restraining order against her label, alleging they had stuck her with a dodgy contract. A few months later, she was shot in the foot by the rapper Tory Lanez after a party. This made her a lightning rod for the rap community’s most misogynistic impulses, with superstars such as Drake and Nicki Minaj lining up to mock her or question her account of events, despite Lanez being found guilty of the assault. She is still being belittled over her victimhood: just two weeks ago, Eminem released an album on which he made fun of Megan’s shooting.
Even if her adversaries can’t seem to let it go, Megan, for her part, seems to have risen above the incident. Her Hot Girl Summer tour – named for the neologism she coined in 2019, which has since become everyday vernacular – is a hugely celebratory affair, one that seems geared exclusively to Megan’s fans, known as Hotties. On a Wednesday night at London’s O2 Arena, they’re out in full force; the sheer volume of their screams is hilariously loud, rivalling the eardrum-splitting ballyhoo I heard when I saw Taylor Swift’s Eras tour last year. They follow along with every syllable Megan raps, newer songs such as Where Them Girls At and BOA treated with the same reverence as old hits Big Ole Freak and, of course, WAP.
Flanked by black-clad dancers, Megan herself cuts the figure of a 90s supermodel, strutting back and forth down various runways and frequently squatting to twerk for ardent fans or read their signs. It’s a skilfully executed show, and her songs with memorable samples or chant-along choruses, such as Kitty Kat and the GloRilla collab Wanna Be, feel as if they were made for an arena setting. What’s more, there is a seemingly endless supply of pyro – I have never seen so much fire at one show – and Megan’s face, perpetually contorting itself into goofy expressions or split into a huge smile, was made for a giant arena screen.
But mounting an arena show is tricky, especially for relatively new artists, and especially if you don’t sell it out. A huge portion of the seated area is empty, as is much of the general admission area; while the crowd’s enthusiasm hardly lacks, having a capacity 20,000 people in the O2 does a lot for sound absorption, and Megan’s fulsome beats feel harsh and metallic when they’re bouncing off the back wall of what is essentially a giant warehouse.
More minimalist tracks such as Captain Hook fare OK in this context, but numbers with busier production often sound incomprehensible, reduced to white noise in such an environment. It’s a disappointing note to an otherwise breezily fun show, but hardly a unique failure: more and more artists, for whatever reason, are playing huge spaces when they might be better suited to slightly smaller venues – the result of a rapidly consolidating live music industry and a desire to make back profits lost during the pandemic years.
If Megan can tell that the sound is lacking – which I doubt – she doesn’t show it. She leads the crowd in a furious twerking contest – “What I really wanna see is who got the hottest ass in this arena!” – and promises to be our “motherfuckin’ hot girl coach”. It’s like a self-confidence boot camp. While some artists who adopt such a tone can come off cloying, Megan makes it seem genuine, perhaps because while her show is precisely choreographed, it never feels as if she herself is reading from a script. (She visibly fans out when she brings out the Japanese rapper Yuki Chiba to perform their collaboration Mamushi.) And while the show may be undersold – a result, perhaps, of many of her fans having spent £100+ on tickets for last week’s hip-hop-focused Wireless festival, as one punter in line for the bar suggested to me, it still feels like a celebration.
