Flo Milli is a Star, and Other Lessons Learned at Buku

Flo Milli onstage at Buku on Saturday, by Victoria Conway

The first music festival in New Orleans of 2022 is in the books, and we learned a few things there.

[Updated] Last weekend, Buku successfully rolled out the first music festival in New Orleans of 2022. The proximity of its Skyline Stage to Tchoupitoulas didn’t bode well for sound bleeding into the neighborhood, but organizers chose and positioned their PA well, so much so that the music from the stage was almost inaudible a hundred or so feet up Race Street.

On the weekend, new contributor Mia Huber reviewed Tame Impala and Tyler, the Creator, but there was more to the festival than the headliners. Here are our notes on some of the other acts that made impressions on us. We also have photos from the weekend courtesy of Victoria Conway.

“Make some noise if you walk around like that bitch,” Flo Milli yells from the mainstage. The opening chords of “Like That Bitch” ring out, the minor piano chords thumping like a hot supervillain’s theme song. The crowd screams as she power stomps across the stage in her Nike Air Force 1’s. Her sequined eyelids glow like pearls as an image of the “burn book” from the 2000’s movie Mean Girls flashes behind her. Halfway through the set, she performs a trap version of the Dora The Explorer song “Backpack, Backpack!” while Gen Z kids jump up and down to the contemporary version of a song from their childhoods, Juuls in hand and a little bit older.

Flo Milli’s confidence set an example for how one should carry themselves. She encouraged women, especially other Black women, to know their worth.

“Wake up and say your affirmations,” she told the crowd. “I got a fuckboy glow,” she rapped with a smile that sparkles. Flo Milli is a star, and she’s just getting started. (Huber)

Dylan Brady of 100 Gecs at Buku, by Victoria Conway

100 Gecs came out on stage in their signature wizard suits, but by the time I got to them, they had stripped down to T-shirts and shorts (with the exception of Dylan Brady, still wearing his wizard hat that looked like a giant peeled banana on his head). The hyperpop duo has undeniable chemistry, as if they are twin souls that found each other. They run around in circles on stage, kicking their legs like they are warming up for a soccer game. They both have long, bleached blonde hair with two-inch thick roots (maybe they dye it together? At the same time?). They look as if elves from Lord of The Rings made grunge music. And it’s fucking amazing.

The duo jumped in unison to the driving snare hits of “mememe,” and the crowd jumped with them. They spun through the smoke as the 8-bit Mario-esque synth played the melody, Laura Les and Brady’s auto-tuned voices carrying the chorus along with it. It took only one note for the audience to recognize “Money Machine,” and upon doing so, instantly started screaming the lyrics. “Hey you lil’ piss baby / You think you’re so fucking cool? / You think you’re so fucking tough?” Les yells as she begins her epic roast. The audience echoes back, “Aw, look at those arms / They look so fucking cute / They look like lil’ cigarettes.”

100 Gecs reminds us to not take life so seriously and prove the point that fun music is just as healing as sad music. In the middle of their set, during an electronic explosion of a song, the person behind me leans over to a friend and goes, “Wow, they just keep on gec-ing.” I couldn’t have worded it better myself. (Huber)

Baby Keem onstage at Buku on Saturday, by Victoria Conway

Baby Keem and later Maxo Kream made the mercantile side of live appearances very clear. They were selling themselves and their songs, not their performances at Buku. Baby Keem performed to his backing tracks, but since he added little onstage, his set played like a listening party for his records. Maxo Kream’s performance veered closer to karaoke. At his performance in the Ballroom, he too performed to his tracks, which already featured a number of vocals including his own. It wasn’t clear that anything was happening live since nothing changed when he raised his mic to his mouth or moved it away.

Hip-hop has struggled with its live presentation since the days of a DJ cutting the music live on two turntables and a mixer. Live bands feel like they’re selling out rap history, but Baby Keem and Maxo Kream didn’t have the answers either. Their sets got good responses, but they were celebrations of their songs, most of which were cut down to a minute or so. The time the two spent on stage added little. (Rawls)

Vince Staples surveys the crowd at Buku, by Victoria Conway

Before Vince Staples came out on stage, a man in a ‘90s nostalgic sweater standing next to me on the barricade had a VHS film camera rolling, pointed and ready for Staples’ entrance. The crowd was full of millennial hipsters and college kids, with day one fans poking out here and there, sporting merch from all of his different eras. The lights turned on, and clips from “As Seen on TV” ads start flashing across the screen as if 20 channels from the Aughts were turned on at once. Oxiclean, Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Rugrats, That 70’s Show, Spongebob. All of the media shown on the jumbotron had a twist: It all featured Staples as the main character.

The crowd wasn’t ready for Staples’ energy. He wanted them to get messy. He wanted to make brutal eye contact with them. He rapped with passion and urgency, while coming off as a little pissed off in the best way possible. Staples took in the sights of the music festival while squinting into the sun, shielding his eyes with one of his hands. “Alright, I see the white people with the dirty feet.”

He made that crowd a major part of his show, and he spent half of his set passing the mic to fans that he could tell know all of the words. During his new single “MAGIC,” Staples passed the mic to a fan on the barricade who was so excited that he almost ran out of breath, then hyped the fan up once he got on stage, encouraging the audience to go crazy for him. “Feeling like I’m floating to the ceiling, is this magic? / Baby, tell me why you disappearin,’ is this magic?” the fan rapped while Staples mirrored him, mouthing the lyrics, not breaking eye contact the whole time.

“What’s your name?” Staples asked with ferocity. “Nathaniel!!!” screamed Nathaniel. “Alright, that song was called ‘MAGIC,’ and it’s by Nathaniel,” Staples said into the mic as Nathaniel and his friends on the barricade lost their minds.

Staples is in love with tomfoolery. His eyes trained on a white dude wearing a giant bucket hat and a plastic marijuana leaf lei in the center of the crowd, and told the security guards, “bring him up on the stage.” The dude had been going hard for the entire set, and once he got up on stage, he couldn’t stop touching Staples and being weird.

“No man, listen to me, just listen to me,” Staples said while keeping bucket hat dude’s hands off of him. “When the beat drops, I want you to jump into the crowd.” This sent the audience and bucket hat dude, into a frenzy. College girlies in the front moved out of the way as this man steps on top of the monitor, beating his chest, feeling like he’s king of the world. The bass rattled through the speakers, and Staples yelled, “one, two, n**** jump!” Bucket hat man hopped off the monitor, jogged towards the barricade, and climbed over it.

Staples shook his head. “I’ve never been more disappointed in my life,” he said “You were talking all this shit, and then you got scared.” Imagine being called the biggest disappointment of Vince Staples life, by Vince Staples himself. (Huber)

Tierra Whack in Buku’s Ballroom on Friday night, by Victoria Conway

Tierra Whack deserved better at Buku. They put her on a stage far from the main ones in the same time slot as Tame Impala, Friday's headliner. The crowd was not large enough for how big of a name she is.

She turned that situation into a positive and played off of how intimate it was compared to most of her shows, interacting with audience members, cracking jokes, making fun of you and looking you in the eye while doing it. Whack didn’t lose herself in the circumstances though and true to herself, singing about sad subjects without letting a moment get too heavy.

“Only Child” was a standout live. The crowd waved their phone flashlights as Whack sang, “Darling, darling, I’ve been praying for you, for you / Darling, darling, I’ve been calling on God for you.” The production and melody keep the song bouncing with ad libs interjected at the end of sentences, but the impression that lingered was Whack’s confidence, which still existed alongside her hurt. (Huber)

Trippie Redd at Buku, by Victoria Conway

Sullivan King’s metal/techno fusion on Saturday afternoon felt like a natural progression for the music and audience. The distorted, aggressive sonics that often accompany techno are just points on the spectrum away from heavy metal, and King made that connection. His percussive tones often sounded like a drummer with double kick drums showing off, and his own vocal exhortations for the crowd to get rowdy and fuck shit up came from the Cookie Monster school of singing.

The set didn’t sound out of the mainstream since many producers offer aggressive textures, beats and tempos, nor was it received as a fusion, in part because there has always been a part of the audience for almost all rock-related music forms that just wants to get rowdy. No exceptions here. (Rawls)

Dave Bayley of Glass Animals at Buku ‘22, by Victoria Conway

Svdden Death’s interest in dark fantasy and an intense presentation connects him to Sullivan King, who he followed on Saturday on the Wharf stage. Svdden Death’s set didn’t just enhance someone’s high, though. It was the high, with a 15-minute stretch that hopped from freaky sound set to freaky sound set, with the musical connecting tissue coming from yet another freaky sound set. His sonic imagination went farther than King’s and strayed outside the genre conventions that seemed to be too present in King’s imagination, making his set far more adventurous. (Rawls)

Porter Robinson on Friday night at Buku ‘22, by Victoria Conway

In recent years, Buku’s headliners have included someone song-oriented and someone dance-oriented: Lana Del Rey and Dog’s Blood (Skrillex & Boyz Noize) in 2019, Migos and Bassnectar in 2018, Travis Scott and Deadmau5 in 2017, and Kid Cudi and Pretty Lights (with a live band) in 2016.

Is Tame Impala in place of a producer telling us something? As Mia wrote on Saturday, they were certainly the emotionally right band for the moment, and maybe their booking is as simple as that. But I wonder if they’re a sign that a wave is cresting or has crested, or if electronic dance music has gone the way of indie rock with a million very good acts but few who can break through and headline.

Contemporary dance music clearly gives Buku its identity, but it will be interesting to see if it remains on the top line of the festival’s schedules in the future. (Rawls)