Future rips off fans in Milwaukee, performing for less than an hour at Fiserv Forum concert

Hip-hop superstar Future's "One Big Party" tour lived up to its name at the Milwaukee stop at Fiserv Forum Sunday.

But Future himself wasn't a big part of it.

Sunday's show started at 7 p.m. and ended just before 11 p.m., a seemingly generous four-hour concert.

But the four openers, or "friends" as the tour calls them — Don Toliver, G Herbo, Mariah The Scientist and Dess Dior — performed for just 10 to 30 minutes each.

And Future, the main man the near-capacity crowd came out to see, wasn't on stage all that much longer. After just 40 minutes, he bolted right before rappers Est Gee and Young Scooter made unannounced appearances, returning when they were done for a closing 18 minutes.

In total, he was on stage for 58 minutes — roughly, just 25% of the evening's runtime.

Making a fashionably scant appearance at a party is one thing. Doing it at a party where people are paying you a lot of money to attend — tickets started at $80 a pop and went up to $450 through Ticketmaster, not including resale tickets — is shameful. His passionate fans deserve better. And so does Future's legacy.

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In a genre moving faster than any other, where new sounds and artists constantly break out, and buzzy rappers and apparent superstars fall out of favor in a blink, Future remains eternal.

Arguably the most important rapper in Atlanta, America's most crucial city for rap right now, Future's melodic approach to trap music, and his syrupy and sometimes mumbled flow, quickly became influential, and will have long-term ramifications.

But he's no relic. He remains relevant with hit after hit, blockbuster album after blockbuster album. Since 2015, he's had eight consecutive albums reach No. 1 on the Billboard 200. That's an exceptional feat, and an eternity in rap years. He's arguably reaching even higher levels of popularity, scoring his first No. 1 singles on the Billboard Hot 100 last year, as a guest for Drake's "Way 2 Sexy" and with his own single "Wait for U."

His place in history as one of rap's most crucial players is sealed in stone. But instead of expanding on that legacy with an equally creative and worthy live show — as Kendrick Lamar and Tyler, The Creator have — Future, in Milwaukee anyway, was merely cashing in.

The fact that he visited 36 songs Sunday may not seem minimal. And the setlist was smartly designed to touch on a lot of eras, making the performance seem more filling than it really was.

An opening back-to-back burst of songs from last year's No. 1 album, "I Never Liked You," lit up the crowd. From there, the setlist had other groupings that helped to build momentum, like a sprint through early songs "Gone to the Moon," "U.O.E.N.O." and "Chosen One," and a collection of love songs near the set's end, including Rihanna collaboration "Loveeeeeee Song," DJ Khaled collaboration "Beautiful" and "Wait for U," that offered a calmness and cool before the explosive climactic pairing of "March Madness" and "Mask Off."

But the sad reason those last two songs worked so well for the big finish — aside from being undeniable bangers, and the dramatic flamethrowers and video effects that accompanied them — is they were practically the only two songs performed in full Sunday. The songs that came before them were almost all snippets, each one a minute or less, often just 10 to 20 seconds long.

Certainly, sometimes less is more, especially when Future's contribution to a song was little more than a powerhouse hook. The crowd got 10 seconds of his Ace Hood collaboration "Bugatti," and that's all the crowd needed to erupt.

But to give nearly every song the short-snippet treatment felt cheap after a while, especially since Future frequently leaned on the pre-recorded backing vocals or let the crowd do portions of the vocal work.

If Future really believed in that less-is-more approach with his catalog, why not give the people another 15 to 30 minutes of snippets? Why not give the crowd something special and do some fun performances alongside past collaborators like Toliver or Herbo? They were actually in the building, sitting backstage (unless they had already fled for the hotel or airport).

Maybe because Future knew he didn't have to bother. His catalog, one of the most beloved among rappers of the last decade, has generated a whole lot of goodwill. His mere presence, and the cameo-like appearances of his songs, were enough to make this the rowdiest, most energized concert crowd of the year.

But after Future abruptly said goodbye for the last time Sunday, and the music suddenly cut off and the lights flipped on, the mood instantly shifted. The party was over. They didn't even bother playing any exit music. And as people made their way out of the arena, under the harsh lights and through the awkward silence, I suspect some of them had buyer's remorse.

Don Toliver, G Herbo, Mariah The Scientist and Dess Dior opened Future's concert

Of the four openers on the bill, Dess Dior had the tough job of playing early for a still mostly empty arena, but the commanding DJ had her back, telling the crowd if they didn’t come to the show with someone ugly to light up their phones. That did the trick, and Dior, whose confident demeanor didn’t show any trepidation for the task at hand, got another lift when Mariah The Scientist came out to do their collaboration “Stone Cold.”

There was a shift in the arena from there, but as much love as Mariah got from the crowd with her subsequent set — I thought the screaming lady in front of me was going to lose her voice — the R&B singer mostly made the set about her female fans, serving as a conduit for their feelings. During “Always n Forever,” she extended her mic into the pit for a singalong, getting an enthusiastic, off-pitch and ultimately infectious response from a fan in the front. And she encouraged her fans to sing along for “Spread Thin,” and many complied — singing directly into their phones, flipping the camera on their own faces for Instagram and TikTok reels.

Through his forceful flow for chest-puffing tracks like “Everything,” “2 Chains” and “I Like,” without pre-taped backing vocals giving his rhymes a cushion, Chicago rapper G Herbo brought a major boost of adrenaline. He started to coast by the end of his 20 minutes, letting a recording of Nardo Wick’s “Who Want Smoke??” play in full with minimal rapping, but the crowd’s energy didn’t dip.

That was not the case with Don Toliver, the most popular act among the four openers. But live instrumentation and name recognition didn’t prevent his set from being a bore, even at a scant half-hour, his Travis Scott-indebted Auto-Tune vocals and R&B/rap blend struggling to light up the crowd. Front-loading the set with cuts from his new album “Love Sick” didn’t help, and by the time he finally brought some energy, shuffling across the stage near his set’s end for his Metro Boomin collaboration “Too Many Nights,” it was too little, too late.

4 takeaways from Future's concert at Fiserv Forum

• Two surprise guests appeared in the middle of Future's set Sunday — up-and-coming rapper Est Gee from Louisville, and Young Scooter, an Atlanta-based rapper associated with Future's label Freebandz. Many in the crowd definitely knew Est Gee, and this could have been a cool bonus, if Future himself hadn't left the stage before they showed up. Ultimately, he was gone for 14 minutes while they performed, the crowd clearly growing restless. At one point, when the DJ cut out the music for Est Gee's set, a clear cue for a big rap-along moment, he was met with the crowd's deadly silence.

• Two other rappers not on the bill briefly performed at the very start of the night — Lil Jairmy and Doe Boy, the latter also signed to Freebandz. And DJ Fresh definitely deserves a shout-out, who did a better job of turning "One Big Party" into an actual party than anyone else, especially with an extended set after Toliver's performance. Ultimately, he was on stage longer than anyone else, by a large margin.

• After getting past security Sunday, I noticed a half-dozen women, none of them seemingly affiliated with each other, all spaced out on different levels of the stairs inside the lobby of Fiserv Forum, posing for photos seemingly for their Instagram pages. It is a nice spot to snap a pic.

• A woman behind me Sunday also asked me to film a video of her with her friends on her phone during G Herbo's set. I was happy to oblige, assuming they might sing along to a song. Instead, they started twerking and slapping each other's butts. Wasn't expecting that.

Contact Piet at (414) 223-5162 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at @pietlevy or Facebook at facebook.com/PietLevyMJS.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Future performs in Milwaukee at Fiserv Forum for less than an hour