Ed Masley

The Republic | azcentral.com

It’s been a year since Drake and Future topped the Billboard album charts with “What a Time to Be Alive.” And that mixtape title may apply more now than ever for Drake, whose Summer Sixteen Tour with Future rolled through Talking Stick Resort Arena in Phoenix a day before Billboard crowned “One Dance” the Song of the Summer -- for obvious reasons.

The tour takes its name from the song that opened last night’s show, the one about “looking for revenge all summer ’16,” in which the former star of “Degrassi: the Next Generation” memorably takes the president to task for going with Kendrick Lamar, with: “Tell Obama that my verses are just like the whips that he in / They bulletproof.”

And if making your way to the top of the rap game while emerging as perhaps the biggest mainstream pop sensation of the hour is the best revenge, it may be safe to just stop looking. Summer ’16 has been his for the taking all along, making Tuesday’s performance in Phoenix feel more like a victory lap than anything for Spotify’s most-streamed artist of 2015.

Arena feels like hanging with Drake

The set was packed with multi-platinum hits, from “Hotline Bling” to “Started from the Bottom,” “Headlines,” “The Motto,” and “Work,” his duet with Rihanna that topped the mid-year list of biggest singles of 2016. He even crammed abbreviated samples of a number of his hits, from "Worst Behavior" to "All Me," into an "I Got All The Hits" medley.

But Drake’s appeal runs deeper than hits. He approaches the stage with an affable hip-hop-star-next-door charisma, telling the crowd repeatedly that he has never told a crowd before that this is easily the best crowd he has ever seen with such conviction, I found myself actually wondering if it could be true. “I’m gonna let you know right now," he told us coming out of a triumphant take on “Started From the Bottom,” “We three songs in, and you killing every single crowd that I’ve seen for the last, like, five years." And the praise got more extreme from there.

He also has this brilliant thing he does where he points out individual members of the audience and says “I see you in the USA hat” or "Shout-out to you in the Degrassi shirt" or the OVO jersey or whatever detail he can add to let that person know they've been seen. I saw several people in my section lose it when he did that, making the sports arena feel like hanging at the club with Drake.

To further pledge allegiance to the Phoenix crowd, he wore a Devin Booker jersey for a large part of the set and gave a shout-out to the Phoenix Suns and Arizona Cardinals in the house ("that's hometown love right there") while often dropping local references into the lyrics. “Born in Toronto,” he rapped in “Versace,” “But sometimes I feel like Phoenix adopted us.” His bandmates – a live keyboardist and drummer – were kept in the shadows, allowing the spotlight to focus on Drake, who commanded that spotlight with ease, occasionally joined by backup dancers.

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The man knows how to work a crowd

The man knows how to work a crowd, riding over their heads in a basket for “Hold On, “We’re Going Home” and frequently taunting his keyboard player for ruining the show, pretending he was making sandwiches on stage while Drake was trying to perform.

He also brought plenty of pyro, from indoor fireworks to intense walls of flame that made my section very toasty, as part of an elaborate yet sparse production. This included trap doors for big entrances and exits, multiple platforms that also served as LED screens and a canopy of what appeared to be more than 100 glowing orbs suspended from the ceiling that seemed to dance in the air on several songs after a single ball dropped for Drake to sing to during “Hotline Bling.”

Future's set, including duets

This is a co-headlining tour of sorts with Future. And Drake took an odd yet effective approach to the arrangement. He took the stage first, performing a lengthy set before Future rose up through the trap door to join him on “Grammys.” Then he relinquished the spotlight to Future, who made the most of the opportunity to shine in a rapid-fire set that found the audience shouting along to such crowd-pleasing highlights as “New Level,” “Blasé,” “Bugatti,” “F—k Up Some Commas” and “Low Life.” After bringing his set to a fiery peak with “Wicked,” Future was rejoined by Drake for “Big Rings” and “Jumpman.”

The concert could have ended there in terms of sheer momentum, but that would have meant a number of important Drake songs of the past year going unperformed, and he’s too good at giving people what they came to see to let that happen. So he hung around and brought the concert to a new peak with a string of recent singles – “Work,” “Too Good,” “Controlla” and the song of Summer Sixteen, “One Dance,” which may have spawned the biggest, most enthusiastic singalong of the entire night.

'Get my credit card and put that s—t on it'

By that point, the show was running into overtime, but Drake was not about to let that curfew interrupt his good time, telling the crowd he’d have to pay a fine to keep performing, and then shouting to one of the guys in his band, “Get my credit card and put that s—t on it.” And with that, he rolled through six more songs before bringing the show to a dramatic close with "Legend."

But before he left, she shared a moving speech about how nights like everyone had just experienced in Phoenix at the Drake show proved that even in these troubled times, there's hope for peace and love and unity.

"I just want to really take in what this moment was tonight," he said, "because I know there’s some crazy times going on in America, but you see tonight, inside the Talking Sticks Arena – that’s what it’s called, right? – inside this arena, we have 14,000 people from all races, from all places, and all we did was get together tonight, we might’ve drank, we might’ve smoked, but we listened to music and we showed love to one another and all we gonna do is go home. So if you can take this concept right here and apply it to your life when you walk out these doors, that’s how we keep this world spinning. We’ve gotta protect each other and love each other every day.”

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Reach the reporter at ed.masley@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4495.Twitter.com/EdMasley.