[News]
Outside the O2 Arena in London on Monday evening, the hip-hop superstar Pitbull tore into a bowl of chicken katsu curry. A few feet away, Pitbull fumbled with an iPhone charger. A lone Pitbull checked his watch, and a conga line of Pitbulls rode up an escalator. Two Pitbulls were holding hands. Four more split a bottle of rosé.
The actual Pitbull — Armando Christian Pérez, a Miami native who steered a boisterous strain of club-rap to the top of the charts in the early 2010s — was backstage, preparing for the first of two performances at the 20,000-capacity arena. Waves of young fans have gotten in the habit of impersonating the artist at each date of his “Party After Dark” tour, paying special attention to his most famous, most hairless, feature.
“I’m pretty sure every party shop in London is sold out of bald caps,” said Jay McGillan, 19.
Mr. McGillan said he had visited seven stores and struck out, so he improvised by drawing a portrait of Pitbull’s sparkling pate directly onto the fabric of his white button-up shirt. He joined a line of fans streaming into the arena, one of them wearing a T-shirt that read: “Good girls go to church … Bad girls go to Pitbull.”
It’s boom times for the concert uniform, a relatively recent phenomenon in which fans coordinate on social media to wear sequins to see Taylor Swift and cowboy boots for Beyoncé. (Jimmy Buffett’s Parrotheads were way ahead of the curve.)
But Pitbull mania is an outlier in terms of its outrageousness, its lack of obvious sex appeal and its uniformity. To wander among the Pitbulls feels like Halloween night, if Halloween had only one costume option and it was Pitbull.
On the sidewalk outside the stadium, fans punched up one another’s costumes with the energy of a demented group project. Shannon Hilton, 25, used liquid eyeliner to draw a goatee on her friend Georgia Burdett. Both have been fans of Pitbull’s party anthems — “Fireball,” “Give Me Everything” — since they were teenagers, and they expected the show to be a nostalgia trip.
Ms. Burdett, 25, was in the process of Pitbull-ifying the black blazer and trousers she had worn to the office earlier that day. She checked out her new facial hair in the reflection of a friend’s phone screen. “Oh, I’m really pleased,” she said.
Most of the Pitbulls said they had gotten the idea to dress up from TikTok or Instagram, where videos of bald-capped fans have been circulating for the past couple of years. But why had nearly half of the crowd chosen to commit so fully to this particular bit, on this particular night, that looking out across the arena felt like swimming in a sea of nude latex?
Ms. Hilton called it a “mob mentality.” Another fan described it as “one big inside joke.”
“As adults, you don’t really have the chance to be silly and dress up as something ridiculous,” said Uvie Emagbetere, 26, who had cut up a pair of stockings to form her bald cap.
Her friend Sofia Sa, 27, had layered three wig caps for an ultrasmooth effect. “We have adult money, and this is what this generation is choosing to spend it on,” she said.
The man who launched a thousand bald caps never expected to have this many imitators. In an interview, Pitbull, 44, said he had first noticed a smattering of costumes when venues began to reopen from Covid-19 shutdowns. The frenzy reached another level during his European tour last year.
“I was like, ‘Man, might as well just call them the baldies,’” he said. “My grandmother always told me in Spanish that I need to fly high, like an eagle.”
He said he was touched that anyone wanted to dress up as him: “When we’re out there having a good time, we’re soaring, and we’re flying high together.”
Pitbull emphasized that the bald cap phenomenon was not some brilliant marketing ploy by his team. (“We never tried to scheme!”) Though he has certainly leaned into it this year, posting montages of costumed fans on social media and shouting out the baldies onstage and in interviews. He now sells a “Mr. 305” kit that comes with a bald cap and bow tie for $19.99.
The tour is heavy on hits from the 2010s, although he released his 12th studio album, “Trackhouse,” in 2023. He said he was proud to attract fans of all ages. “My demographic is from the diaper to the diaper,” he said.
He exploded onto the stage on Monday just after 9:30 p.m., wearing a skintight leather bomber jacket and leaping up and down to the beat of “Hey Baby.” He thumped his chest, stuck out his tongue and led the crowd in a call-and-response: “Who came to party?” “We came to party!”
The crowd of bald caps included students, accountants, construction workers and 10 members of a fitness group that often worked out while listening to Pitbull. Fans chucked beach balls that looked like globes toward the stage in reference to one of the artist’s nicknames, Mr. Worldwide.
Ross Ladbrook, 47, was smug when his friends complained that their caps were becoming uncomfortable. He had been bald ages before Pitbull touched down in London, and his look was finally au courant. “I feel welcomed,” he said.
Heidi Lees, 39, wore jeans and a green T-shirt, her hair in a ponytail. “I’m too old,” she said of her lack of bald cap. “I didn’t know it was a thing.” She had been surprised by the tireless parade of Pitbulls, but said it had won her over with its absurdity: “Humans just being humans is fun.”
As the concert wound down, the Pitbulls boarded the tube at North Greenwich station and peeled off their adhesive goatees. They shook out their sweaty hair. One Pitbull vomited into a trash bag.
The spell had broken. But once you have seen so many Pitbulls, it can be difficult to see anything else. Not far from the stadium, I approached a woman carrying a dog with a wrinkled snout, wondering if she had brought the pet as an especially literal accessory.
She did not seem aware that there was a concert going on. “It’s an English bulldog,” she said, tartly.
[English News]
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