Tory Lanez performs at The Lyric Wednesday night. Photo by: Ariel Cobbert
Last night, The Lyric Oxford hosted one of its most highly anticipated shows of the semester, Tory Lanez.
Making a stop on his “I Told You” tour, Lanez has had a highly successful past two years, putting out chart-toppers such as “Luv” and “Say It.” Big names usually mean big performances, but perhaps nothing was more disappointing than last night’s show.
For somebody who clearly has the resources to put on a show worthy of praise, Lanez fell short of this in a way that is so epically embarrassing it will go down in history as potentially the worst performance I have seen in my many years of attending live music shows.
First things first, and the thing that probably makes the show so incredibly infuriating for those who paid to see this man sing, Lanez chose to take the route of singing over his vocals for the entirety of the show.
For those who are not familiar with this practice, many artists nowadays play the vocal track from their recorded music while they sing along on their microphone. It’s something that has become all too common in the hip-hop and R&B genres, and last night might be the most extreme case I have seen.
Not only was Lanez taking part in this awful practice, but it was to such an extent that I couldn’t even hear him actually singing live. I kind of felt like I was just watching Lanez dance around while his music played behind him.
Tory Lanez performs at The Lyric Wednesday night. Photo by: Ariel Cobbert
This point aside, Lanez also ruined the night with his sheer lack of energy and engagement in the music he was performing. It was obvious that he was expecting the audience to provide this type of energy, but no entertainer should ever make this assumption.
So, at this point, we have a singer — whom you can’t hear sing — kind of just walking around moodily for the entire show. It is clear that he feels like his stardom and status are what entitle him to put on such a show, but ultimately, that just comes off as cocky and completely unjustified.
As the cherry topper to this already awful night and waste of money for those who actually bought tickets to this event, the entire show was totally disorganized. Lanez would perform part of a song, stop it in the middle, talk for a bit, then move on to another random track and then repeat this process for basically the entire night.
The man couldn’t focus for more than two minutes. It was random, weird, hard to understand and ultimately just unprofessional.
Lanez was on stage for about 35 minutes and then ended his show with no encore, something else that was shocking at the time. But looking back at it, this lack of length was certainly on par with everything else that night.
When I interviewed Lanez a couple of days ago, he very proudly told me that he was going to be the greatest artist in the world. If he continues to put on shows like this, he will never achieve that goal.
