The backdrop fell, and Macklemore, his back to the crowd and pointing an orange foam finger skyward, rose triumphantly on a platform. The crowd, having only waved their arms when heavily prompted by the openers, cacophonously broke loose into a roar.

And they danced.

Backed by full-band fanfare, Macklemore opened his headlining set during a tour stop at the Carrier Dome on Monday with the swaggering “Ten Thousand Hours,” setting the tone for a bombastic, larger-than-life concert.

“I was really excited when I found out he was coming,” said Anna Lilikas, a senior music education and communication sciences and disorders major, who was sporting oversized sunglasses.

The dancing didn’t come easy during the show’s openers. Mississippi native and rhymesmith Big K.R.I.T. tried with little avail to convince a still-arriving audience to dance along to his Southern-tinged hip-hop. Heavy on club bangers, bone-rattling beats and hype horns blaring from a DJ stand retooled to look like the hood of a solid-gold Cadillac jutting through the back of the stage, Big K.R.I.T.’s set didn’t engage in much banter.

“Once again, I’m Big K.R.I.T., for those of you who don’t know,” the rapper said as a set-closing reintroduction.

Taking a stage bathed in blue lights, Brooklyn mainstay Talib Kweli didn’t fare much better in captivating the crowd. Kweli deferred his choruses to prerecorded vocals blasting from the PA system, refused point blank to rap about weed (“This is a family show, this is a private college,” he said) and covered the Beatles’ staple “Eleanor Rigby” midway through his set.

But some crowd members still found that wanting to dance along anyway was, well, the best reason to keep on dancing.

“I didn’t know who that was,” Lilikas said, “But we just wanted to dance, and we did.”

After the crowd awaited the headliner with an anticipatory hush between sets, Macklemore finally came onstage and doffed his jacket to flaunt a Syracuse basketball jersey emblazoned with his name, and the audience proved they didn’t need music to dance. Between songs, Macklemore pointed out an errant crowd surfer also sporting a basketball jersey, cracking wise about the fan’s audacious attempt to catch a wave of outstretched hands.

“We have just elected a new student body president here in Syracuse, and it is that guy right there,” Macklemore said jokingly.

With his longtime music-making partner Ryan Lewis spinning beats and rallying the crowd from up high, elevated from the rest of the stage, Macklemore wove between regaling larger-than-life stories and rapping hits at breakneck speeds.

While the rapper rambled through fictitious yarns as prologues to some of his biggest hits — his introduction to “Thrift Shop” was a meandering throwaway joke involving skinny-dipping in Onondaga Lake and putting on his iconic fur coat — Macklemore didn’t shy away from including more socially conscious songs in his set.

“I’m surprised they got Macklemore,” said Rachel Heyman, a sophomore music education major. “He’s more alternative than what they’d usually bring.”

Preaching the importance of forward thinking and bringing noticeably emotional singer Mary Lambert to sing the song’s hook, Macklemore got the audience swaying tenderly to “Same Love.” He tugged at heartstrings again later in the set, spotlighting his string section on “Wing$.”

And they cried. Well, maybe the waterworks weren’t actually visible, but the sentiment sweeping from the stage was palpable.

But Macklemore, a consummate showman, played most of his set for laughs. He made a quick costume change and donned a matador’s suit of lights, mirroring his music video for “White Walls.” He bluffed a story about being best friends with Leonardo DiCaprio and Snoop Dogg in a convoluted lead-up to the smash hit “Can’t Hold Us.”

The rapper beatboxed his way through a freestyle, only after making the audience promise to keep the performance off YouTube if he flubbed his rhymes.

“You bastards,” he said jokingly when he caught sight of students clamoring for their phones to film the performance.

And they laughed.

Borrowing from the rock star playbook, Macklemore split from the stage after “Wing$,” expecting shouts for an encore that started just seconds after the stage lights dimmed. But after an introduction video announced the artist’s next stage persona, he reappeared as his flamboyant alter ego Raven Bowie.

Under the guise of his faux-British moniker, an outlandish Ziggy Stardust wig and a fur-tufted rainbow of a cape he wore over his jersey, Macklemore unleashed his persona in a glitter-spangled rendition of “And We Danced.” The crowd danced along in a flurry of streamers and glitter, shot out from cannons.

Again departing from the stage — this time for a much-needed switch from his Bowie getup to a well-received navy blue No. 44 football jersey — Macklemore returned, then swathed in brilliant orange and green for a second encore, “Irish Celebration,” crescendoing in a blast of confetti. It flurried like Syracuse snowfall, hanging suspended in the air for most of the song.

Macklemore recycled “Can’t Hold Us” to close out his encore. And despite having demanded the crowd to prove their energy during the first iteration of the song, the crowd danced just as frenetically during the repeat performance.

And they had a really, really, really good time.

Published on November 12, 2013 at 2:50 am

Contact Erik: ervanrhe@syr.edu | @therealvandyman