White rays of light spiraled from the ceiling as Jordan Terrell Carter, known by his stage name Playboi Carti, danced onto the IU Auditorium stage wearing a black and white camouflage ski jacket.
"Make some noise if you are here for Playboi Carti," Carti's DJ said, to an uproar of applause and shouting.
Playboi Carti, Joey Purp and Boombox Cartel performed Friday at the IU Auditorium for the annual Little 500 Concert.
Before Carti, Joey Purp and Boombox Cartel opened the show with rap and electronic music.
Joey Davis, a Chicago rapper known as Joey Purp, kicked off the evening with an eight-song set. Members of the crowd waved their arms and shook their hips from side to side when the DJ accompanying Purp dropped the first beat for the song “Morgan Freeman.”
Purp said he has been in Bloomington a couple of times.
“I hear you are a good party school and that you have a lot of beautiful women here,” Purp said. “Where the girls at?”
Purp proceeded to rap the song “Girls @” while the audience cheered and jumped.
Following Purp’s set, Americo Garcia of the duo-group Boombox Cartel took the stage, mic in hand. He sang into the mic, but the audience could not hear him. The audience chanted for the sound engineer to turn up the mic until Garcia noticed he could not be heard.
“Can you turn the mic up?” Garcia said. “I’m getting ready to throw down.”
Blue, green and red lights flashed as he stepped up to the turntables and mixers to play a remix of Drake’s song “God’s Plan.” Members of the crowd roared and pumped their fists in the air.
“Yo, who wants to learn how to DJ?” Garcia said.
Audience members screamed with joy in response. The volume of the screams grew when Garcia selected IU students Marissa Moss and Erik Hufford to DJ with him on stage.
“There are two buttons here,” he said. “I’ll tell you when to press this green one.”
Moss got to push the green button to drop the beat for the next song. Hufford and Moss danced on stage and Moss took a selfie while dancing with Garcia.
Near the end of his set, Garcia played a remix of The Killers' song, “Mr. Brightside.” The crowd sang along and he lowered the volume of the music so the voices of the audience could be heard.
“I’m coming out of my cage and I’m doing just fine,” the audience sang. “Gotta gotta be down because I want it all.”
After Boombox Cartel left the stage, Playboi Carti's DJ played several well-known rap songs.
“Get your hands up, Bloomington,” Carti said. Members of the crowd threw their hands in the air in anticipation of the first song.
Crowd members shrieked when Carti performed the song “Magnolia” from his self-titled mixtape released in 2017. The song reached No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2017.
“Hide it in my sock, selling that rerock,” Carti sang.
Throughout Carti’s set, images played on a giant screen. Some of these images contained guns, women in bathing suits shooting guns and Carti being showered in money.
Once his next song started, the scent of marijuana wafted through the venue. Security guards begun scrambling around.
The audience shouted and jumped up and down for Carti’s song “wokeuplikethis*.”
"I swear I had these thots before I got the fame, and I swear I had the Glock before I got the chain," Carti sang.
