Megan Thee Stallion’s Charlotte show was the last on her U.S. tour. Was it hot? Or not?
It started with a wardrobe malfunction that, in some respects, wasn’t entirely surprising.
It ended sooner (and perhaps more abruptly) than fans might have expected.
And for the two hours in between on Wednesday night, the raw, resplendent rappers GloRilla and Megan Thee Stallion gave a pair of performances at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte that were often buoyant and boisterous — but also, by turns, a bit confounding.
The show was in fact a last-minute early-summer surprise. Just one week prior, Live Nation had announced Megan Thee Stallion’s run of 2025 shows was being extended “due to popular demand,” adding a July 2 gig in Atlanta and an Independence Day Eve booking that suddenly would make the Queen City the final American stop on the “Hot Girl Summer Tour.”
“Popular demand” was right. In a mere seven days, she sold upwards of 18,000 tickets. PNC has concerts that have been on sale since last year that haven’t been able to do that.
It was a late-arriving crowd, though, and many missed the costume-related chaos that marked GloRilla’s first few minutes on stage.
Here’s how it all went down:
The 24-year-old Memphis phenom — who blew up in 2022 when her single-ladies anthem “F.N.F. (Let’s Go)” went viral — emerged flanked by five female dancers wearing yellow bikini tops and black boy shorts, and a couple of men in ninja masks toting fake gold Uzis. Her own outfit, meanwhile, was the real stunner, featuring bright-yellow drawstring pants flecked with silver sequins and a black crop top that was tied off at mid-chest but otherwise left little to the imagination.
After she bounced and swayed through her first two songs, “Opp S---” and “Lick or Sum,” I actually wrote in my notes, “She is, like, MILLIMETERS from popping out.”
Then, not a minute later ... during Song 3, “Bad Bih 4 Ya,” a female crew member rushed out mid-song to fiddle with GloRilla’s top.
The crew member retreated off-stage, and the rapper segued into “All Dere,” spitting the lyrics into the mic she was clutching in her right hand while holding her top in place with her left. The crew member then returned twice more to work the problem. Both times, a dancer stood sentry to shield the rapper’s body from view; both times, to GloRilla’s enormous credit, she never broke lyrical stride, keeping pace with the song’s flow as she was getting everything affixed back into place.
“Had a motherf------ outfit malfunction and s---,” she exclaimed, finally, after successfully navigating to the end of that fourth song. “I don’t wanna moon y’all, or flash y’all with my t------. Come on! Who put the tape on my shirt??”
(This came, notably, less than three months after tabloid reports that one of her breasts apparently popped out while she was being given a field sobriety test during an early-morning traffic stop in Georgia that led to an arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. She later took to social media to clap back at trolls, growling, “Stop acting like y’all are so motherf------ amazed by a nipple. It ain’t s--- but a nipple. Calm down. Please calm down.”)
Anyway, she clearly trusted the new piece of tape. For the remainder of her easy, breezy 35-minute set, GloRilla moved confidently through physical maneuvers that had her doing everything from waving her arms in the air to leaning back and shaking her shoulders in sync with her dancers.
She closed with a wardrobe surprise, dropping to her knees and pretending to wail away on an electric guitar before ripping off the hair-down-to-her-hips wig she’d been wearing, revealing a nearly shaved head — and sending the crowd into a frenzy.
Fans had just 15 minutes to cool off before Megan, since neither woman used a live band, meaning there was virtually nothing to change over on stage between sets.
Then, as soon as the 29-year-old Houstonian appeared, things got hot again.
It was hot literally. Still in the mid-80s and humid when she appeared atop a riser in silhouette at 9:15 p.m., stifling enough that her whole body was slickened with sweat by 9:30. (Plumes of pyro during multiple songs probably had something to do with that, too.)
It was also hot figuratively, by design. The two bikini-ish outfits she wore — though requiring less tape — showed significantly more skin overall than GloRilla’s. At nearly every possible opportunity, Megan either a) turned her back to the audience, pitched her upper body forward, and shook her lower body in a fashion explicitly engineered to accentuate her rear end’s jiggly-ness; or b) dropped down into the lowest squat possible and commenced to her other signature move: Twerking.
Literal and figurative hot-ness are fitting for a Megan Thee Stallion concert, though, aren’t they? “Hot” is, after all, in the name of the tour. Fans do call themselves “Hotties.” Megan’s current catchphrase, repeated over and over on Wednesday night, has become “Real hot girl s---!”
And, as she’d done in every other city along the way, she brought her Charlotte “Hotties” in on the act, inviting 10 of all shapes and sizes on stage during “Where Them Girls At” to let them mimic her moves.
I don’t always think bringing fans on stage is a great idea. At the Lovin’ Life Music Fest in Charlotte in May, for instance, I thought Post Malone made a bad decision in inviting a woman up to sing one of his songs — because while it might have made her friends’ night and might have made her entire life, the other 30,000 of us were all thinking, Um, we paid and came to hear YOU sing, not some random stranger.
But in this case, with Megan’s show, it worked — because watching 10 people enthusiastically shake what their mamas gave them is actually pretty amusing AND Megan kept rapping. She didn’t have someone else rapping for her.
Although ... OK, here’s where this gets complicated.
My one main complaint about the concert is that she did spend too much of the show letting someone else rap for her. Although, wait, that’s not accurate. I mean, it’s not someone else. It’s her. It’s Megan Thee Stallion.
It’s just, it’s a track of Megan Thee Stallion. A pre-recorded track of her rapping pretty much all of each song.
“Freak Nasty,” sounded like she was doing a duet with the backing track. “Kitty Kat,” leaned very heavily on the backing track, with a few live vocals from Megan in between pelvic thrusts and hip gyrations. “Sex Talk” and “What’s New,” spent an alarming amount of time signing autographs and accepting bouquets of flowers and posing for fan pics as the tracks played.
I know she’s not the only rapper who does this. I’ll also tell you that she looks like she’s having way more fun than the average rapper, and I deeply respect her willingness to engage with fans on an individual basis in a way I’m sure those fans find meaningful. But if GloRilla can manage to rap through a relatively serious wardrobe malfunction, I have to believe Megan can do the same while shaking her bottom or clutching a floral arrangement.
My other main complaint is that the show not only seemed short, but it was short.
Megan said early in her set, “Y’all, I’m so sad. This is our last American stop!” Then later, when GloRilla joined her for “Wanna Be,” Glo lamented, “I’mma cryyyyy! ... I don’t want it to be over!” Yet on this night, her performance was all over in a mere 75 minutes — quite possibly the briefest Megan’s clocked on her entire tour, during which most of her other sets reportedly have lasted upwards of 90.
No encore, or any sort of long kiss goodbye in Charlotte. Just one more short twerk to wrap show-closer “Savage” —
— and she was gone.
Megan Thee Stallion’s setlist
1. “HISS”
2. “Ungrateful”
3. “Thot S---”
4. “Freak Nasty”
5. “Megan’s Piano”
6. “Gift & a Curse”
7. “Hot Girl”
8. “Kitty Kat”
9. “Cobra”
10. “Plan B”
11. “Cognac Queen”
12. “Big Ole Freak”
13. “Girls in the Hood”
14. “BOA”
15. “Sex Talk”
16. “Realer”
17. “What’s New”
18. “Captain Hook”
19. “NDA”
20. “Wanna Be” (GloRilla cover)
21. “WAP” (Cardi B cover)
22. “Where Them Girls At”
23. “Body”
24. “Savage”
