“I think this is the hottest outdoor gig we’ve ever done,” Rhian Teasdale of the British band Wet Leg said during the Mo Pop festival on Saturday, July 30, at Detroit’s Hart Plaza. “It’s warm.”
Hot, as a term, definitely applied to the eighth edition of the music festival, which began nine years ago in and around the Freedom Hill Amphitheatre in Sterling Heights. The weather was indeed toasty, with both days in the sun-soaked mid- and upper-80s. The music was hot, too, with more than 30 contemporary and mostly up-and-coming acts playing on three stages, one devoted to techno and curated by Haute 2 Death.
And Mo Pop’s new site put a little heat into the festival — back after two years of pandemic postponements — as well.
Where West Riverfront Park, the Mo Pop’s home for five years, was a flat an open field, Hart Plaza provided plenty of scenic diversity, not to mention more shade, (including the signature fountain at the center of the site) and parking options. It was also user friendly in that organizers telecasted performances between the two performance stages, which were in close enough proximity to the other that those among the 30,000 concertgoers who opted to hang by the non-active stage could hear the other clearly.
Mo Pop also celebrated the site by naming stages after iconic Detroit music venues — the Grande Ballroom and the Eastown Theatre — while between acts the video boards offered Fun Facts and trivia questions about Detroit. By the end of the weekend, if you didn’t know who Hart Plaza is named after or when Detroit was founded, shame on you.
Mo Pop also provided a triumphant homecoming for Detroit-raised rapper Big Sean — “one of the greatest nights of my life,” he declared. His festival-closing set Sunday night, July 31, on the Grande Stage was his first full concert performance in these parts since 2017 (he did perform at halftime of the Detroit Lions’ Thanksgiving Day game in November), and his 75-minute show was filled with special moments related to the city and his life here — none more touching than when he brought his parents and older brother on stage to pay tribute to his grandmother, Mildred Leonard, and the Congressional Gold Medal to her World War II U.S. Army battalion, in which she was one of the first black female captains in the service.
He followed with a rare performance of his 2015 single “One Man Can Change the World,” which the rapper said his grandmother inspired.
One of several Mo Pop acts that also performed at Lollapalooza in Chicago over the weekend, Big Sean (nee Anderson) also dug into his early mixtapes for songs such as “Mula” and “Supa Dupa Lemonade” and reminisced about recording them nearby, on Griswold Street, and about making songs in teenage pal Mike Posner’s basement. He brought girlfriend Jhene Aiko — who performed earlier in the evening and is pregnant with the couple’s first child — onstage to duet on “Beware” and “I Know,” noting that Detroit was the first place they, well, you know. Big Sean also previewed a snippet from a new song slated for his upcoming sixth album and populated the rest of the set with favorites such as “Mercy,” “Clique,” “Blessings,” “Dance (A$$)” and “Bounce” back, peeling off his T-shirt and throwing it into the crowd during the latter.
The rapper also promised a quick return, saying that, “we’ll see you on tour” and implying that will be in the near future.
Mo Pop offered plenty of other musical highlights during the two days. Performances by acts such as Wet Leg, Horsegirl, Girl in Red, Dominic Fike and Ashe (in her “last show for a little while”) affirmed the buzz surrounding them, while Beach Bunny’s Lili Trifilio battled through vocal problems during an exuberant Saturday set on the Eastown stage. The funky Houston trio Khruangbin, meanwhile, didn’t lose a step, even when the Eastown set lost power on Sunday; the group kept the crowd dancing by playing percussion, including glass bottles, until the juice returned and it rolled through a fluid, mash-up style set featuring instrumental snippets of favorites by David Bowie, Elton John, Warren G, Parliament-Funkadelic, PM Dawn, Spandau Ballet, Warren G and Chris Isaak — to name just a few.
