Goddamn. I am writing this review two days after the concert and I am still in pain and still buzzing and still listening to I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU. Peggy is so good dude. I saw him in 2019 at Coachella and I remember it being great, but I couldn’t tell you any details about it except that it was during the heat of the day and he kept looking like he was going to get a heat stroke cause he was wearing a heavy vest. This time around, the crowd was way bigger and more energetic and Peggy’s discography is way bigger. Though I am quite happy we still got “1539 N. Calvert,” “Thug Tears,” and (my alarm every morning) “Baby I’m Bleeding.” All three went insanely hard and featured some of the most communal and charged moshing of my life. People were just out there having a fun time and it showed. It was electric in the crowd and it showed in the way we would all shoot up and freak out at the start of every song, a shared awareness of the imminent wall of noise and subsequent surge of the crowd. It was a sight to see the “BIG BOOTY HOES” sample fly out and light up the crowd like a torch to one of the three pig’s houses (the wood one). Instant blaze. And it was the same with the Logan Roy sample start of “don’t rely on other men” and the haunting clapping at the start of “SCARING THE HOES.” And really it was true of most of the setlist. 

It was a concert for jumping up and down and letting the crowd be your public transportation. The amount of ground I covered that concert was ridiculous. I would get right up to the stage, just a few people back from Peggy, and then be crashing into people towards the back half: this rotation would rinse and repeat multiple times per song. There were some refreshing reprieves though, such as his acapella rendition of “Call Me Maybe” and “either on or off the drugs.” But most of the show was utter chaos and sweat and crowd and people and just raw reaction to music. It was fucking awesome. Within minutes of getting there I saw people crowd surfing and was able to join them after getting some tall guys to lift me. I surfed a few people towards the front before I got dropped, caught, then returned to the floor. And then I got right back into the mosh. 

Also, when I say the mosh, I mean much more a constant swirl of bodies crashing into each other and moving as an amorphous blob of humanity that was more akin to a hurricane than an actual pit. Though some large pits did open up during the show, as well as a few small ones that popped up, which offered delightful little dance opportunities with an encouraging crowd. I really enjoyed getting in there and just grooving, at one point doing a pseudo-Dio pose and leaning back until my back was on the ground before getting back to my feet to the cheers of the people that had been knocking into me the last hour. It was beautiful.

To end off this review, I’ll recount two fun extra moments from the night: One was when this tall shirtless sweaty dude leaned in towards me and said to me “I’m going to lift you on my shoulders” and I was like “sure.” As he squatted down and I hopped on his shoulders. I feared I was going to break his neck or back or something cause he was struggling to stand and some guy nearby was like “dude don’t break him,” but the guy lifting me was insistent and was like “no help him up” and he did, to his credit, stand up and carry me on his shoulders for like 30 seconds before dropping me back to the ground. I would crash into this guy in the mosh several times more in the night, chill dude. Another was actually after the show when I was walking to Boardner’s for their Club Decades Brat Night that I was hitting up with some friends and I saw this guy walking away from the Palladium with the same shirt I bought (white long sleeve T that says the tour name). We exchanged the mandatory “cool shirt bro” and “wow that was sick” words of greeting and went on our ways. But we kept walking the same way and only changed directions when I turned down a street to hit up a 7/11. Lo and behold, I see the same guy later at the club and would see him like 3 or 4 more times throughout the night and then after when we were separately waiting for ubers outside the club. The Brat/JPEGMAFIA one night combo is great though—highly recommend—so honestly not surprised I was not the only one to do it.