At 10:40 on Thursday night — 20 minutes before the originally scheduled end time for Lil Wayne’s concert at PNC Music Pavilion in Charlotte — a woman in the seat directly behind me started cursing the type of blue streak typically reserved for, well, a Lil Wayne song. And she was hardly the only fan who was growing more and more irritated by the hip-hop star’s unexplained tardiness: Ten minutes later, hundreds if not thousands of his fans started booing, boisterously.
At 9 a.m., PNC recommended in a post on X that fans should “arrive early,” “to avoid peak traffic.” The gates opened on time at 5:30 p.m. The scheduled start time of the show, per Ticketmaster and Live Nation, was 7 p.m. From 7 to 8 p.m., background music emanated from the front of the house while the house video boards cycled through ads for upcoming Live Nation shows and an assortment of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
