Sao Paulo
When Machine Gun Kelly took the stage at Allianz Parque in São Paulo just after 5 p.m., the audience wasn’t big enough to see him. It is one of the attractions at the GP Week festival taking place this weekend.
The American singer wore a pink Formula 1style jumpsuit, while his band wore similar styles in black. It is a reference to the race of the sport, also held at the weekend in São Paulo, and justifies the existence of the festival.
The seats at the Palmeiras Stadium were anything but full for MGK’s show, as he is known. No sector was full on Saturday afternoon (4), from the most expensive to the cheapest, including tens of thousands of empty chairs there was not a single person upstairs.
The small capacity does not mean that the audience was small, after all the alliance holds almost 50,000 people on show days. However, the occupancy rate was far below the available space.
As a rapper and later successful poppunk singer, MGK immediately showed these two facets. He transformed “Papercuts,” a rock song, into “Pressure,” a trap song, in a move that was repeated throughout the show.
But despite his rap past, the singer now leans more towards poppunk, in a kind of reinterpretation of the rock sound that defined the 2000s. Visually it also emulates this era in a homage to the emo aesthetic.
With this in mind, he continued with “God Save Me,” in which he tells the story of a depressed and maladjusted teenager with suicidal thoughts and drug problems. He then joked that aliens were invading Allianz Parque and sang “Concert for Aliens.”
Although MGK always communicated with the public, the audience was reasonably warm, with the exception of a few more emotional fans. He wanted to please so much that he sang Don Omar’s hit “Danza Kuduro” in Portuguese.
In this song he asked if he was really in Brazil or the United States. It was a provocation for the audience to make more noise and participate more in the performance.
MGK even wore a Brazilian soccer team tshirt and reminisced about the show he did at the Lollapalooza festival last year. This is his second visit to Brazil.
During “Drunk Face,” one of his biggest hits, the artist forgot the lyrics of the song and started the performance over until he got it right. He later sang the title in the audience.
“I know you guys are here to see Swedish House Mafia,” he said, referring to the final performance of the day, which comes after pop singer Halsey. “I’ll pretend you came for me. But if you don’t sing the next song, I’ll cry.”
There was still time for “Forget me Too,” which caused a lot of excitement in the audience. Although the song was recorded at the same festival with the participation of Halsey, the attraction of the day, she did not appear at the São Paulo performance.
In the end, the show lasted just over an hour, with no request for an encore and without ever really wowing the audience. It wasn’t for lack of commitment from the singer, who even changed his clothes a few times and never stopped asking the audience to join in.
Night had just fallen in São Paulo when Halsey entered the GP week stage. The singer performed just after 7 p.m., an hour after Machine Gun Kelly finished his show.
She found Allianz Parque to be a little more crowded than the previous attraction, especially on the race track. However, the chairs still had many empty spaces.
Halsey began to sing amidst the flames of fire. He presented his pop repertoire, starting with “Nightmare,” accompanied by a rock band with drums and guitar.
In “Castles,” an epic song played on a stage with frantically flashing lights, he urged the audience to jump as much as possible. After he started, he paused and started talking to the Brazilians.
Just like Machine Gun Kelly had done hours before, she recalled singing at the 2016 edition of Lollapalooza in São Paulo. She said it was one of the best evenings of her life.
Halsey brought more fans to GP Week than MGK, but she didn’t find as enthusiastic a crowd as the last time she came to Brazil. Aside from a few people closer to the stage and in the chairs, most of the audience remained silent as she produced the jumps.
The singer continued with the ballad “You Should De Sad” before returning to speak to her fans. She apologized for taking so long to return to the country, but said she had become pregnant and had to deal with the pandemic in the meantime.
After Lollapalooza seven years ago, she returned to Brazil twice more. The last one was in 2019.
On stage, Halsey plays pop music that is sometimes danceable, but doesn’t turn Allianz Parque into a dance floor. His repertoire includes thoughtful and emotional songs like “The Lighthouse.”
At this point, more or less in the middle of the show, you could hear a lot of people talking in the far corners of the dance floor. The singer’s fans were more concentrated near the stage.
Halsey noticed this geographical distribution after singing “Honey.” She said it was difficult to create the setlist because she knew that many people went to the festival just to drink beer and dance, while her fans were closer to where she was singing.
For this first group, she said, she added some hits to the setlist. As for the fans, he had to sing the “strangest” part of his songbook.
It was a performance more suited to the current moment in Halsey’s career. After evolving from indiepop singer to global success with the danceable “Closer,” she branched out into a more rockinfused repertoire.
The current show reflects this feeling. “Gasoline,” a 2015 track, grew heavier and roared at GP Week. 2020’s “Experiment on Me,” which is played next, could be a song by the band Runaways.
But the best was saved for last. After she said again that Brazilians were the best audience in the world and her name was called, “Without Me” and “I Am Not a Woman, I’m a God” followed.
It was the songs that caused the most excitement and the audience actually lived up to the American’s expectations by turning on the lights of their cell phones and singing loudly. The almost 1h30 long lecture ended.
While Machine Gun Kelly, originally a rapper, and Halsey, originally a pop singer, performed rock shows with a band, the main attraction of GP Week captivated the audience with only pickup trucks. Swedish House Mafia closed the first day of the festival in São Paulo.
Shortly after 9:30 p.m., the electronic music trio appeared on the Allianz Parque stage with the lights completely turned off. It was an impressive entry onto the scene for an audience that hadn’t grown larger since Halsey’s previous show.
Even for the main show of the evening, most of the seats in the stadium were empty. The tracks were full, but there was space in all areas of the event.
As the Swedish House Mafia took the stage, a battalion of cell phones were pointed at the stage. The audience filmed electronic music during much of the set.
As the name suggests, the group is Swedish and focuses on house, a style of electronic dance music that emerged worldwide in the 1990s, and its derivatives. It consists of Axwell, Steve Angello and Sebastian Ingrosso, DJs each with successful careers.
The set was fluid, with remixes and dance beats, eventually turning the stadium into a dance floor. The trio immediately released an excerpt from the funk song “NQuero Pique” by MC Th.
The three DJs took turns at the microphone and invited the audience to interact with the songs. They also cheered on the audience with their hands raised and climbed onto the table that held their equipment.
By the time they played “Leave the World Behind” and “More Than You Know,” the audience was already there. What previous shows lacked in energy and audience participation, it made up for in the main attraction.
The audience sang along to the melodies and songs with lyrics. He also jumped and danced like he had never done before that Saturday, almost always with his cell phone raised and pointed at the stage.
Swedish House Mafia’s show was dynamic and based on drops a type of “cue” typical of electronic music where the beats become faster. They were preceded by shouts of “São Paulo” or “Are you ready?” from DJs.
Between hits from the group, individual DJs and quotes and remixes of other people’s songs, such as The Weeknd and Travis Scott, the set turned the festival into a rave. The darkness and twinkling lights of the stadium set the mood, and fireworks and pyrotechnics completed the experience.
“Reload,” a hit by Sebastian Ingrosso from ten years ago, had the audience singing along before the trio thanked the audience and praised the city of São Paulo. They said they hope to return to Brazil soon before releasing “Moth to a Flame,” the group’s hit collaboration with The Weeknd.
The highlight came, as expected, with “Don’t You Worry Child,” Swedish House Mafia’s biggest hit and the song that put the trio’s name on the music map. They said goodbye to the public in São Paulo after 11 p.m., thus ending the first day of the GP week.