Black and Yellow Fever: Top 15 hit, Waken Baken Tour has everyone buzzing about rapper Wiz Khalifa
-
Wiz Khalifa
Share with others:
Aside from that one incident -- you know, where he got busted for pot, spent the night in a North Carolina jail and had to put 300 grand in bond -- the 60-city Waken Baken tour was an off-the-charts, raging success.
Wiz Khalifa left Pittsburgh in September as a perennial up-and-comer with a huge buzz (pun intended) and came back home with his name bumping up against stars like Eminem, Nelly, Rihanna and Bruno Mars on the pop charts.
With: Mac Miller, DJ Bonics.
Where: Stage AE, North Shore.
When: 8 tonight and Friday.
Sold out.
Over the next two nights, the 23-year-old rapper plays two homecoming concerts at Stage AE, his first in these parts since the summer, for what promises to be the most hyped-up and adoring crowds of the tour. Just another couple of sold-out dates on a trail littered with them.
"I was surprised to see as much support as I got," Wiz says of Waken Baken. "I don't really have too many expectations when I go out, you know what I'm sayin', so it really set the standard for what we can accomplish.
"[Pittsburgh's] gonna be crazy. I can't wait."
Prince of the City
When Wiz was interviewed by the Post-Gazette back in 2005, at age 17, he said, "We've got a football team. But we really don't have too many musicians, especially in hip-hop, where you can say, 'That dude's from Pittsburgh. That's Pittsburgh right there.' There's nobody out there like that. And I hope to be one of the first to step out and put us on the radio."
For a rapper, it doesn't happen without that kind of confidence. Beyond that, what sets him apart is, he has the rhymes, the swagger, the look, the pot-fueled work ethic (if that's not a contradiction in terms) and the right people around him to make it happen. He even has the back story.
An army brat who grew up with divorced parents, Cameron "Wiz Khalifa" Thomaz lived in North Carolina, Oklahoma, Georgia, South Carolina, England and Germany before he even hit middle school. He came to Pittsburgh with his mom when he was 8, started rapping when he was 9 and cutting tracks at 13. When Chad Glick (then of Strict Flow) and Benjy Grinberg caught wind of the Allderdice student, at 16, he sounded like he'd been rapping for decades, they say.
First Published December 16, 2010 12:00 am
