Some show reviews I pitch because you can't beat getting paid to go to a concert you'd see anyway, and some I suggest out of simple curiosity. What follower of the culture at large could resist the opportunity to check in on Britney Spears, and especially to find out who, after all these years, is still showing up to see her? After Saturday's concert in Philadelphia, I can verify that Spears still has a robust following of women in tight clothes and gay men in even tighter clothes, but Nicki Minaj's opening set, and especially the deafening roar that went up from the crowd as she closed with "Moment 4 Life," should have been enough to put Spears on notice. Minaj reappeared during Britney's final song, but only as a virtual presence, adding a pre-filmed rap verse to "Till the World Ends"; apparently Minaj has taken the stage sometimes and not others during the Femme Fatale tour's six weeks, but you have to wonder if it's Spears' way of holding off the competition.
Further thoughts on the show, via the Philadelphia Inquirer, are here, but a tad more on Minaj that I didn't have room for in the short piece. This was an entirely different, and substantially more girl-friendly staging, than her opening set on Lil' Wayne's "I Am Still Music" tour, which is to say more feminist sci-fi, fewer dildoes. The overarching narrative, in which Minaj battled a Predatory villain named Nemesis, was semi-coherent — the muffled sound mix didn't help in that respect — and bit more than a little of off Janelle Monáe, but it indicated that she's thinking big, and that thrilling things are still ahead.
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