Mariah Carey serenades Sydney for the first time in 11 years, and we greet her with a sea of bald caps and business blazers.
Here she is, singing Hero – crystalline, mind you – to thousands of Pitbull cosplayers, who have just sweated off their drawn-on goatees during the rapper’s high-octane set of hedonistic 2010s EDM, and are now swaying along to Carey’s ballad.
The four-city Fridayz Live festival marks the elusive chanteuse’s first Australian shows since 2014, but it’s unmistakable: Pitbull was the drawcard for a large swathe of the sold-out audience of 45,000.
Whether Carey even notices it is up for debate, as she is in her own glamorous world, shuffling around the stage as though her rhinestoned playsuit were a floor-length gown weighing her down.
She simply focuses on her voice, and as she whizzes through 18 songs in 60 minutes – Emotions, Always Be My Baby, Obsessed, Heartbreaker, Touch My Body – it’s hard to fault her process. Is Carey a little stiff on stage, waving at odd intervals as though she’s an animatronic? Sure, but she sounds impeccable, hitting both her whistle tones and the rich, coarser notes on cuts from her recent album.
She’s backed by three singers and a live band, all in ivory suits and dresses, with Carey offering plenty of ad libs and vocal runs throughout to prove she’s not relying on backing tracks. Any gospel airs are dispelled by the seven buff dancers prowling across stage, gyrating while Carey pays them no notice.
Carey is the closing act of Fridayz Live, Australia’s biggest national R&B and hip-hop festival, which returns to Brisbane, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne this year after pausing in 2024, citing difficulties in landing a strong lineup.
This year’s Fridayz Live – beginning in Brisbane on Friday, followed by Sydney on Saturday, with Melbourne and Perth next week – has no such problem, booking two sure sellers: Carey, an indelible talent (and celebrity), and Pitbull, who’s experiencing a pop-culture resurgence thanks to TikTok, as people cosplay his look at his concerts and turn it into content.
In Sydney, it was impossible to look anywhere and not see a bald cap. Mostly, it’s women – and mostly, it’s a straight copy – though some added their own stylish flair, whether it be by going for a boyfriend shirt look complete with a billowing black skirt, or tiny denim shorts paired with Dr Martens.
It’s really Pitbull’s night – and he knows it. The 44-year-old’s performing style lands somewhere between a boyband member, impassioned pub karaoke participant and an evangelical preacher. This is high praise.
Entering stage with a leather jacket, he is dripping from his head by the third song, jumping and thrusting towards a camera. The ceaseless medley of his many dancefloor fillers about living life large – Hotel Room Service, DJ Got Us Fallin’ In Love, Timber – is repeatedly interrupted for Pitbull’s short song introductions, which double as self-help sermons.
These aphorisms are screamed in unison by the crowd, either familiar with the lyrics (“Ask for money and get advice, huh / Ask for advice, get money twice”, from Feel This Moment) or his lore (sample tweet: “Life is not a waste of time, and time is not a waste of life. So let’s stop wasting time, get wasted, and have the time of our lives”). During Pitbull, there is only joy – even when his DJ mixes in the White Stripes’ 7 Nation Army, Metallica’s Enter Sandman or Europe’s The Final Countdown for little reason.
Nothing makes sense, which is a theme of Fridayz Live as a whole. Maybe there’s a randomness at its core, with the festival beginning in 2016 as a spin-off from RnB Fridayz, where 2Day FM and other Hit Network radio stations across Australia play R&B all day.
Between sets on the event’s single stage, sizzle reels play for the station; host Kat Sasso pops out to say five words before disappearing; a video plays of Emma Stone lip-syncing DJ Khaled’s All I Do Is Win; interstitial DJ Yo! Mafia puts a QR quiz on-screen for the audience to vote for the next song, but then never plays the track.
The slight messiness – mostly technical issues which somehow don’t affect any of the artists’ sets – only adds to the frenetic vibe, as does some artists’ use, seemingly, of AI-generated slop for their visuals.
The random ramps up with firecracker Lil Jon, who just keeps popping up after his set (no complaints). And then again with Wiz Khalifa, who uses his hit See You Again, a tribute song to Fast and Furious actor Paul Walker, to host an in-memoriam slideshow mid-festival after having rapped “yo yo yo yo” over a Snoop Dogg song for several minutes.
Even Mariah Carey gets random, in her own, perfectly on-brand way – inviting thousands of Pitbull impersonators to scream All I Want For Christmas Is You as confetti falls like snow on a humid October night, in the final moment of an event called Fridayz Live, held on a Saturday.
Fridayz Live runs 24 October at Langley Park, Perth; 25 October at Marvel Stadium, Melbourne
