Though its been moved from its original namesake location, the Treasure Island Music Festival is still going strong. This year’s fest boasts a hip-hop and dance-heavy lineup. Performers include A$AP Rocky, Pusha T and Aminé—all hot off studio releases this year. Also on the bill are a pair of interesting team-ups: Diplo and Mark Ronson (performing as Silk City) and Toro y Moi getting together with Nosaj Thing under the banner of Laff Trax. All this plus avant-garde vocalists Serpentwithfeet and Moses Sumney. Filling in the headliner spot next to A$AP is Kevin Parker’s psychedelic rock outfit Tame Impala.

Treasure Island Music Festival
Sat-Sun, noon, $105+
Middle Harbor Shoreline Park, Oakland

Just before performing “Peso” late Friday evening at Avalon Nightclub, A$AP Rocky stood and watched as the packed room chanted his name as if it were their dying words—and he smiled, frozen, turning his back to gather himself and for perhaps the first time, to acknowledge the possibility that he is greater than even he knows.

“I always dreamed of this. I always wondered if you fucked with me out here,” he said, grinning and glassy-eyed. However vain and reckless Rocky claims to be, he can’t help but expose the conceit that he likes being liked. What’s weird is that he’s made, what, 12 songs? And they’re all fairly similar—at least in subject matter, production value and charm. So if ever there was a question about “why” the world has taken almost violently to the A$AP movement, this show would answer it.

Youth played a part. Youth always plays a part. The shelf life for most rappers is very short, and A$AP knows this better than anyone else—even Drake, who he would open for the following evening at the San Jose State Event Center. A$AP’s DJ played a few Biggie tracks, commemorating the 15th anniversary of the rapper’s death, and though the audience had eaten their “hip-hop vegetables”—a steady diet of Mobb Deep, Wu Tang, and Biggie Smalls—it dawned on me that most of Rocky’s fans at the all-ages show were barely in kindergarten when Biggie passed. They might vaguely know the lyrics to “Ready to Die,” but they definitely know every single Waka Flocka Flame song in existence.

Like any great hip-hop show, the evening felt a little riotous. Girls who’d probably spent all day getting gussied up for one chance to fall into Rocky’s purview were crammed against the stage. I overheard many of them complaining about very strange assaults—one woman said a man rested his chin on the nape of her neck, yelling “A-SAP!” directly into her ear. He was later escorted out.

Watching the audience was a little more fun than watching Rocky, himself mesmerized by the crowd—elbows-to-elbows, X’s on their palms, jeering a nasally and unconvincing opener, crying “Rocky! Rocky!,” making the most curious of requests. He had them eating out of his palm all night, and in return, they slipped ziplock bags of weed to him, whittled blunts, phone numbers.

And he seemed overjoyed to be there, and happier to be accepted. He only attempted the meekest of angry commentary. “I don’t wear diamonds,” which he deemed the property of “hippies.” Though very much a stylish lothario, quick to namecheck designers Rick Owens, Raf Simons, or embrace the eccentric schoolboy look of Brooks Brother’s Thom Browne, he looked more somber, head to toe in black. Still, he used his pedestal to scold some: “I fucks with Hypebeast, but fuck the posers that check that blog to get fly, n–ga!”

The evening’s best moments came when Rocky finally acknowledged the melting pot of influences that make up his body of work: Houston, New Orleans, Nashville and Cleveland. Using the instrumental for Three Six Mafia’s “Sippin’ On Some Sizzurp” to play against his own “Purple Swag,” the connection might have seemed more literal than stylistic. Realizing it quickly, he segued back into the original beat, and the crowd seemed thankful to be in the present instead of the past. When his DJ dropped Juvenile’s “Ha,” the Cash Money track featuring a teenaged Lil Wayne, Rocky just grinned some more, said “fuck it,” and dove into the crowd.

View more photos from the show.

On November 10, 1891, Arthur Rimbaud died. On November 10, 2011, on the 130th anniversary of the hapless French poet’s death, Drake’s album “Take Care” was leaked. And for the last four months, he’s unknowingly embarked on a tour to resurrect Rimbaud’s central thesis of maddening love – in packed arenas across the country. And Friday at the San Jose State Event Center, the audience will respond.

A lofty premise, to be sure. We know the rapper is sensitive. The evening will see Drake speak, or rather sing, interspersed with moments of rapping. He’ll do it with some discomfort. Though a loner at heart, he so badly wants to be an accomplished showman, to command the world’s attention in a way that bigger icons like Jay-Z now seem born to do. The high paranoia and introspective dint of “Take Care” would seem to jibe better in an intimate setting—not a college stadium. And so, fortunate for him, the album’s true message is padded with hip-hop cliches like a spoonful of sugar, so you’ll better digest the emotional medicine.

In “Tale,” one of Rimbaud’s most famous poems from his collection Illuminations, he spoke of a monarch’s driving motivation – perfection in love:

“A Prince was annoyed at always being occupied with perfecting vulgar generosities. He foresaw amazing revolutions in love, and suspected that his wives could come up with something better than complacency adorned with sky and luxury. He wished to see the truth, the hour of essential desire and satiIsfaction. Whether or not this was an aberration of piety, he wanted it. He possessed at the very least a rather broad human power.

Drake thinks much about “vulgar generosities,” “revolutions in love,”, “something better than complacency adorned with sky and luxury” – and has tried to convince us to celebrate them.

None of his accomplices can know about this. The evening will begin with Harlem’s resident ‘it’ kid, A$AP Rocky, who, in the cyclical nature of popular culture is refreshing because he’s a nostalgic. As is Compton’s Kendrick Lamar, who once saw Tupac Shakur in a dream, and sometimes displays Pac’s ability to inhabit misguided spirits so he can better understand them (on the subject of dates, their birthdays are a day apart).

Drake will have to breathe life into some dispiriting material, and relive bravura highs and bravura lows in the span of a less than two hours set. If not heard in the appropriate order, “Take Care” is manic. The emoting can get intense, and the cagey, expected machismo he proffers in return might ring untrue to less sympathetic ears.

Just how he’ll distribute the story of his relationships will prove interesting—how will the narrative unfold? Will the saga of his recklessness, with confident and knowingly brash tracks, like 2010’s “Money to Blow,” or his verse on DJ Khaled’s posse cut “I’m On One” be paired next to the superficial idol worship of “Best I Ever Had” and “Make Me Proud”?

What he does best is pay homage—to women, to his family and sometimes unconvincingly, to himself. Strange as it is to ask a rapper to be further self-aggrandizing, it’s just as much in Drake’s interest, as it is in ours, that he celebrate himself.

Drake performs at San Jose State Events Center on March 10 with Kendrick Lamar and A$AP Rocky. Tickets are sold out.