![]() ![]() ![]() They don’t know what they’re missing, which is something that might feel a little bit comfortingly familiar, at least in wide swaths of the show. There weren’t many middle-agers at Wednesday night’s show, which had the 21-year-old playing to the second of two full houses at Staples Center. It’s no wonder that he performs the new album almost in its 17-track entirety on this tour, or that the crowd doesn’t balk at the predominance of the fresher stuff: He’s pulling off the hat trick of singing realistically about young-adult anxieties while still allowing fans to luxuriate in a relaxed, “what, me worry?” vibe. On “Free Spirit,” the production is more sophisticated, even when it sounds sparer, but so is Khalid’s emotional life, in which he’s started to worry about a lot more than “do(ing) all the stupid shit that young kids do.” ![]() He’s matured in the more important ways, anyway, with a sophomore album, “Free Spirit,” that’s a big improvement on the one that preceded it, the likable enough - but more, well, sophomoric - “American Teen.” It’s not every star that gets to count the second full-length release as the better one, but it makes more sense when you remember, as Khalid reminded the Staples audience, that the first one came out when he was 17, an age when… okay, when Billie Eilish is already operating at a genius level, but pretty much no one else. Champagne tastes and meetings with Bob Mackie can wait. His every-day-is-casual-Friday look counts as a visual trademark by now, but it’s also a signifier to an audience (mean age: somewhere around his own 21 years) that you can still think of him as a humble dorm-room confidante, not a suddenly emboldened show-biz grifter. If you’re a fan in the slightest, though, it’s kind of refreshing that Khalid has not taken the fact that he became one of music’s biggest contemporary stars almost overnight as an obligation to suddenly start wearing long pants. You might have to go to a Lakers game to find a Staples headliner that changes up the look fewer times in the course of a night. When he reemerged, he was wearing shiny basketball shorts and one of his own tour T-shirts. During a mid-show video montage, he disappeared from the stage wearing shiny basketball shorts and a Gucci T-shirt. Khalid’s dancers went through a good number of costume changes during Wednesday night’s Staples Center show, but the star himself took just one. ![]()
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February 2023
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