The chaos of the crowd: fakemink at UC Santa Barbara
Rosemary Cromwell is news reporter for KCPR. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
The 850 students in the food-court-turned-concert-venue at UC Santa Barbara made up the best-dressed and worst-behaved audience I’ve ever been a part of.
Far from his hometown of London, fakemink — your favorite rapper, artist and teacher — made the Central Coast a stop for one of his first ever headlining performances with a sold out show at The Hub at UCSB.
Tickets were $15 with no student ID requirement. This is where I ran into my first snag, because despite purchasing the tickets, I never received a confirmation email. It took two phone calls with the school ticketing office to get a paper copy set aside at will call for me. UCSB uses AXS for ticket distribution, and according to one representative I spoke to, this was a common problem I was far from the only one experiencing.
Luckily for those of us navigating technical difficulties, fakemink didn’t come out until an hour and a half after doors opened. This was partly due to the crowd’s behavior.
“My friend got elbowed in the face,” said Cal Poly business junior Annika Layton, “I definitely got stepped on a lot and shoved a lot.”
This has been an issue at almost every underground rap show I’ve attended. This generalization about a bunch of niche rappers is unfair to their music, but is beyond fair to their fans who seemingly have no concept of concert etiquette, safety or how to mosh properly. Instead, they seem content to mush their waxed denim and sweat together in a blender-like situation, hellbent on creating crowd crush conditions.
At a Lucki show in San Francisco’s Masonic Auditorium, several people had to be pulled out of the crowd for going too hard during the opening DJ set. Similarly, this month at Smokedope2016’s show at the Great American Music Hall, the mostly adolescent audience decided the last song was going to be their time in the spotlight, and everyone in the pit rushed the stage as the performance came to a close. Several audience members attempted to take Smokedope2016’s hat and ski mask, both of which he wears to shield his identity.
If you’re looking to get into this kind of noise, I’m warning you now that spatially unaware teenagers wearing sunglasses worth more than my journalism degree will comprise the better half of the audience at every show you go to.
This crowd was no exception.
The show opened with the iconic “Easter Pink,” fakemink’s most-streamed solo song. A great point of entry for any uninitiated fakemink fan, he raps about all the classics: modifying his sprite, attractive women wearing designer clothes, driving fast and partying hard.
Whether he’s composing a sonnet about Hedi Slimane or waxing poetic on Ann Demeulemeester, fakemink’s obsession with high fashion is consistently represented in his catalog. His style matches the aesthetic of many “Gen Z” rap talents, a sort of “dirty designer” look that says, “I dropped five bands on this shirt, ripped it, ashed on it, and stained it. Can you say the same?”
This look, inherited from A$AP Rocky, has been reimagined by countless artists; the flex, of course, being that they can wear a 1-of-200 collaboration piece like you wear a sleep shirt. For his Isla Vista appearance, fakemink rocked a backpack shaped like the Pokémon Mew, black skinny jeans and a black graphic tee.
fakemink first tasted mainstream success with his 2024 EP, “Wild One,” featuring hit songs such as “Chinchilla” and “Blow Me.” However, “LV Sandals,” with Scouse rapper EsDeeKid and compatriot Rico Ace, is undeniably his most popular song, having amassed over 28 million streams on Spotify alone. This is half of why UCSB economics junior John Ghobrial went
“It’s cool that up and coming artists can come and play college campuses,” he said. “I mean, a $15 fakemink ticket is a great deal.”
Producer OK and artist Laker Brady got a chance to play audience members for the night, taking pictures with fans and getting shout-outs from fakemink during the show. OK is the production behind fakemink’s “Music & Me” and “Crush,” as well as several classic songs from OsamaSon and teenage prodigy Nettspend. Laker has collaborated extensively with other underground rappers such as Joeyy and Smokedope2016 on their song “Gucci Snake,” and has an extensive solo discography including hits like “In My Balmains” and “Door.”
As fakemink began to leave, the crowd begged him to play “Makka,” one of his hit songs featuring Mechatok and Ecco2k of the Swedish Drain Gang collective. fakemink returned to the stage to tell the audience he would play one more song, “but it’s not Makka. It’s not. It’s not Makka,” he said.
The underground sensation from London ended the set by serenading the capacity crowd with the song of their dreams.
