Two similar acts – Trippie Redd and A Boogie Wit da Hoodie – took the American Family Insurance Amphitheater for Saturday’s Summerfest headliner show. The two performances could not have been more different.

Trippie Redd, the first of the two headliners, came out an offensive 76 minutes late – 13 minutes after his set was supposed to end – delivering a more than disappointing 28-minute performance.

The fans, whose energy flailed while Trippie Redd’s DJ stalled for over an hour, surprisingly bounced back when Redd finally came on stage. Many fans found themselves singing along to his opening number. That enthusiasm, though, faded quickly when Trippie stopped singing his second song, relying on the fans in the audience to sing for him, leaving the amphitheater uncomfortably quiet behind the pre-recorded tracks playing in the background.

Trippie Redd remained unengaged throughout his unacceptably short set. Redd barely sang or rapped along to any of his songs. Chain-smoking, Redd staggered back and forth on the stage, uninterested with the thousands of fans who paid to see him.

Trippie Redd’s disrespect towards Milwaukee is, unfortunately, nothing new. In Redd's first Summerfest performance opening for J. Cole in 2018, his DJ didn’t show. In 2020, when he headlined the Eagles Ballroom at the Rave, Redd came out 80 minutes late and disappeared from the stage just 30 minutes into performing.

After the lackluster performance by Trippie Redd, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie quickly bought out his DJ and hype man – who kept wrongly referring to Summerfest as Summer Set – to try and salvage the concert.

While A Boogie’s DJ brought the energy to the Amp, playing a mix of sing-alongs and trap mixes, he didn’t seem to have an appreciation for the Milwaukee fans that came out to see him. Instead, he called out the fans who drove up from Chicago, asking them to cheer loud, consequently ignoring most of the crowd: the Milwaukee fans.  

Despite the DJ’s rocky start, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie delivered a headline-worthy show. His opening song met with fire, smoke and cheers from the crowd on their feet. Throughout the set, A Boogie Wit da Hoodie was accompanied by flames, fireworks and sick video backgrounds to amplify his performance. A Boogie played for nearly an hour, leaving the stage just before Summerfest’s midnight closing time.

The Bronx-born rapper performed his famed auto-tuned tracks. Each followed similar themes to his 2016 start: a rapper with everything yet is still rattled by relationships turned sour and a wariness towards others. These themes seem to resonate with fans who propelled A Boogie to the number one spot on the top 500, reaching higher ranks than Roddy Ricch and Justin Bieber in early 2020 and selling enough records to earn platinum – albeit not enough to sell out the American Family Insurance Amphitheater, where the back half remained empty despite an array of discounts and added performers.

A Boogie Wit da Hoodie’s songs show the evolving state of hip-hop music, one where artists have moved away from traditional rhyme bars to more singing than rapping. Luckily for A Boogie, he has a talent for mixing lyrical fervor with melodies that stick with hip-hop fanatics while simultaneously bringing in a new generation of fans, one that showed up for A Boogie as a noticeably young crowd.

A Boogie’s blended hip-hop style commanded the Amp. His signature tunes, like “Me and My Guitar,” played alongside more angsty songs like “D.T.B. Interlude” and tributes to Pop Smoke, PnB Rock and Juice WRLD. The concert ended with the popular song “Drowning,” a flurry of confetti and a crowd in a much better mood.