Rolling Loud Australia 2019
Australia is known for its diverse festival scene, we’ve got large festivals drawing the biggest acts in the world such as Splendour In The Grass and Listen Out, to concept based festivals that provide us with rich and unforgettable experiences like Snowtunes and Wine Machine. When news broke that Ultra and a string of other large international festivals were hitting our shores soon, we and a lot of Aussies were left wondering where is our Hip-Hop festival at? With Supafest coming to a close many years ago, it was almost ridiculous a dedicated festival didn’t exist in Australia, you know for the most popular genre in the world?
We vented our frustrations on Facebook with a post describing how now every one of our large festivals has a Hip-Hop artist as their biggest headliner and yet we still don’t have a Hip-Hop music festival, with a cheeky Rolling Loud tag to get their attention :)
Little did we know Rolling Loud at the time were already planning to launch in Australia and were just about to announce the big news.
Fast forward a few months and here we are in a surreal moment, waiting in line at Sydney showground about to experience not only our first dedicated Hip-Hop festival in so long but a festival organised by the best to do it — Rolling Loud, undeniably the biggest Hip-Hop event in the world (just look at their 5th anniversary line-up that just dropped). Even though our Australian line-up doesn’t come close to their gigantic Miami bills, we were all grateful it was happening and the line-up albeit small, was perfectly curated — with crowd favourite — Playboi Carti, master of club bangers — Future, up and coming Atlanta talent — Gunna and comeback artist of the decade — Tyga among many more. To be honest, we and a lot of fans were shattered to hear the last-minute pull outs from Lil Uzi Vert and Ski Mask but we’ve all been in this predicament before (is it really an Australian music festival without a last minute act cancellation?), so it was expected and not as hard-hitting as it could have been. Amidst the frustrations, we have to remind ourselves the complexities of bringing down who are now deemed the current rockstars of the planet all the way down to Australia, a country with one of the strictest visa acceptance rules in the world.
The festival also added last minute security measures given the tragic events of drug-related deaths over this summer (not really tackling the problem but hey we’ll save that for another article), so we found ourselves waiting in line for over an hour — meaning we unfortunately missed some of the first acts. However, we were just in time for Gunna’s high energy performance which set the path towards a great night for the Whatslively team. Playboi Carti was next and boy did he control the crowd (and by controlling we mean he got all of us certifiably wildin’ out), from his earlier hits to Magnolia the atmosphere was electric. Although when he did finally play the much anticipated Uzi collaboration “Shoota”, we did feel the absence of Uzi as it would have been truly epic if they both performed that together.
Tyga was up now and to no-ones surprise songs like Taste and Dip got the crowd moving and shaking. Even though we’ve been seeing a lot of YG lately and the hype wasn’t that high for his appearance as a result — he reminded us all why we didn’t mind seeing him again. Next up should have been Uzi, but as a replacement (and a solid one at that) we got brother duo Rae Sremmurd and for us this was our highlight of the night. You forget just how many great songs these guys have managed to churn out during a small amount of time and every banger from No Flex Zone, to Powerglide, to No type, to Swae’s big hits Unforgettable and his current number one song with Post Malone Sunflower — it was fire all the way through and we enjoyed every bit of their set. Just like YG, even though Rae were just here recently, we loved seeing them again and they were a fitting headline act for Rolling Loud Australia.
To close out the event we had Future and despite being a little late, bangers like Mask off, and Low Life made the wait worth it and he closed out the event nicely.
All in all, we thought the launch for Rolling Loud Australia was a great success. As this was their launch event, it needs to be noted the Rolling Loud team deliberately kept it small, and given that the event went really well (in our eyes)— be sure to expect much bigger things for 2020. Tariq Cherif the co-founder at one point during the night got the mic and told us all to get excited for next year, with a very excited crowd response. We cannot wait for what they have in store for us in 2020, and of course we’ll be there to cover it for you guys.
P.S Thanks to Rolling Loud for recognizing local talent Manu Crooks and The Kid Laroi and putting them on your 2019 Miami lineup, we hope this is the start of seeing more Aussie acts on the Miami bill.
