Of the many gigs set to take place in Hyde Park this summer, Wireless veers closest to hipness, thanks to its dance/hip-hop/R&B lineup. And this year, thanks to the rain, it also felt like a proper festival. Punters sloshed through soupy mud and performers offered incantations to coax out the sun, with Saturday's headliner, Drake, instructing us to chant: "I don't give a fuck about the rain tonight, because we've come to see Drizzy go insane tonight!"
For the record, Drizzy stayed sane – well, the man has a rap empire to run – but 60,000 fans moshed madly, if that counts. It was a contrast to the night before, when headliner Deadmau5 failed to sell the place out, leaving Joel Zimmerman – the Canadian DJ inside the flashing mouse head – playing to a half-empty field. His techno/house set, bolstered by a light show that probably cost more than his computers, showed him as a successor to the Chemical Brothers. And while we're talking successors, earlier in the day the downbeat Irish soulboy Maverick Sabre was an unshaven rival to Plan B's Strickland Banks, while Pennsylvania's Santigold crisply incorporated steals from MIA and Nicki Minaj into her staccato hip-pop. Dressing her male band in matching shorts only increased the joy. Meanwhile, rap veterans the Roots were nobody's successors; their jazz-influenced show, with its tuba-player and cover of Sweet Child o' Mine, was unique and wonderful.
On Saturday, Drake kept acolytes churning up the mud with apocalyptic graphics, and a cameo by Nicki Minaj on Make Me Proud, but his beefy MCing left you wondering what all the fuss was about. The day's best performances happened further down the bill: the fabulous Nigerian Afrobeats DJ D'banj was an almost shamanic presence in the second stage tent, and the murky psych-pop of Canadian R&B singer the Weeknd filled the tent like a miasma.
Sunday offered a chance to check out two of the year's biggest hypes: A$AP Rocky was a party-starting loudmouth who must have American jocks in raptures, while Kreayshawn would have been lost without her hypeman, who provided ballast to her yappy rapping. The relentlessly perky Jessie J had a good deal of the CBeebies presenter about her, but was great fun nonetheless, and headliner Rihanna, entering between two Egyptian statues, was surprisingly powerful. "Are there any Europeans here?" she bawled, knowing Europe – or at least this corner of it – was hers for the taking.
