As we reached the mid-point of 2023, one of the biggest topics of discussion among music fans was how no rap album had yet reached No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart — the first time this had failed to occur by July since 1993. The long streak has finally been broken, however, by Lil Uzi Vert, whose third studio album Pink Tape entered the albums chart at the top, also marking Uzi’s third album to reach No. 1.
.@LILUZIVERT‘s ‘Pink Tape’ officially debuts at No. 1 on this week’s #Billboard200 chart, becoming their third career No. 1 album.
As Billboard notes, the last time the first half of the year featured no rap No. 1s was in 1993 — two years before Uzi was even born — when Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday debuted at No. 1 on the August 7th chart, 34 weeks after Ice Cube’s The Predator. The last rap album to reach No. 1 before Pink Tape was Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains on the December 17 chart, a 29-week gap.
Between the two, SZA’s SOS and Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time have absolutely dominated the No. 1 spot, at 10 and 15 nonconsecutive weeks each, respectively, while four albums each spent one week at the top. Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito, Stray Kids’ 5-STAR, Taylor Swift’s Midnights, and TOMORROW X TOGETHER’s The Name Chapter: Temptation. That’s a lot of K-pop.
This week’s top 10 sees Morgan Wallen’s One Thing At A Time at No. 2, Peso Pluma’s Génesis at No. 3, Midnights at No. 4, and Wallen’s previous album Dangerous: The Double Album at No. 5. The remaining five, in order, are SZA’s SOS Gunna’s A Gift & A Curse, Swift’s Lover, Aespa’s MY WORLD, and Rylo Rodriguez’s Been One.
Catch the wave of Lil Uzi Vert’s electrifying Pink Tape Tour following the release of their latest genre-bending effort. It’s a dash of neon pink in the heart of Hip Hop as Lil Uzi Vert takes to the road to support their newly shared third studio album, Pink Tape. The tour also promises a kaleidoscope of sonic and visual delights as exciting as the artist himself.
A synthesis of eclectic stylings and compelling collaborations, Pink Tape has found its rhythm among the stars of the charts. Power hitters including Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, and Don Toliver have also lent their talent to star-studded project. Already garnering a wave of approval and admiration, it’s a journey destined for the coveted No. 1 spot—at least, many hope so.
With the audience’s pulse echoing the infectious beats of Pink Tape, this tour is set to be a spectacle. It’s expected to weave together an experience transcending the conventional outlines of concert-going. The applause is deafening, the anticipation palpable, and the energy…pure Uzi.
When & Where Is Lil Uzi Vert’s The Pink Tape Tour?
Produced by Live Nation, the 17-date tour kicks off on Saturday, October 21, in Minneapolis at The Armory. The Pink Tape Tour will undoubtedly cover all major U.S. markets, with stops in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and more. The trek will finally wrap up in Uzi’s hometown of Philadelphia on November 22 at the Wells Fargo Center. This is their first headlining go-round since Uzi’s Endless Summer Tour in 2018.
Where Can Fans Get Tickets?
Uzi’s Pink Tape Tour is expected to sell out, but you can still grab tickets if you’re lucky. They went on sale at 2:00 p.m. local time on Friday, July 7. Tickets can be purchased by visiting ticketmaster.com.
The Pink Tape Tour Dates
October
Sat Oct 21 — Minneapolis, MN — The Armory Mon Oct 23 — Chicago, IL — Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom Tue Oct 24 — Cincinnati, OH — The Andrew J Brady Music Center Wed Oct 25 — Detroit, MI — Fox Theatre Tue Oct 31 — Boston, MA — MGM Music Hall at Fenway
November
Thu Nov 02 — Hampton, VA — Hampton Coliseum Fri Nov 03 — Raleigh, NC — PNC Arena Sun Nov 05 — Birmingham, AL — Avondale Brewing Company Mon Nov 06 — Atlanta, GA — Coca Cola Roxy Wed Nov 08 — Dallas, TX — South Side Ballroom Thu Nov 9 — Austin, TX — Moody Center Fri Nov 10 — Houston, TX — 713 Music Hall Mon Nov 13 — Denver, CO — Fillmore Auditorium Thu Nov 16 — Los Angeles, CA — The Kia Forum Sat Nov 18 — San Francisco, CA — Bill Graham Civic Auditorium Mon Nov 20 — Brooklyn, NY — Barclays Center Wed Nov 22 — Philadelphia, PA — Wells Fargo Center
Lil Uzi Vert is set to embark on their highly anticipated PINK TAPE TOUR, a 17-date headline tour produced by Live Nation. Starting on October 21 in Minneapolis at The Armory, the tour will stop in major cities, including Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, and more, concluding on November 22 in Philadelphia at Wells Fargo Center. Tickets will be available starting with the general on-sale beginning today at 2 PM local time at ticketmaster.com.
This marks Lil Uzi Vert’s first headlining tour since 2018’s “Endless Summer Tour,” and it comes hot on the heels of their latest album, Pink Tape, released on June 30, 2023. The album features popular tracks such as “Just Wanna Rock” and their Red & White EP, which includes standout songs like “For Fun” and “I Know.”
With recent electrifying performances at the 2023 BET Awards and appearances at events like Wrestlemania 39 and The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Lil Uzi Vert is ready to captivate audiences nationwide with their dynamic stage presence and hit songs.
Lil Uzi Vert has announced the dates for their upcoming Pink Tape Tour supporting the album of the same name. Kicking off on Saturday, October 21 in Minneapolis, the tour will consist of 17 dates, concluding in the rapper’s hometown, Philadelphia, on Wednesday, November 22. It’ll be Uzi’s first official tour since 2018’s Endless Summer Tour.
Tickets will go on sale beginning today at 2 PM local time on Ticketmaster.com. Although Uzi’s openers have not been announced yet, you can bet that they’ll reveal them in due course. Meanwhile, fans already have plenty of new Uzi music to look forward to; the fashion-forward rapper has already teased a follow-up to Pink Tape in the form of LUV Is Rage 3.
Check out the upcoming tour dates below.
Atlantic
10/21/2023 — Minneapolis, MN @ The Armory
10/23/2023 — Chicago, IL @ Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom
10/24/2023 — Cincinnati, OH @ The Andrew J Brady Music Center
10/25/2023 — Detroit, MI @ Fox Theatre
10/31/2023 — Boston, MA @ MGM Music Hall at Fenway
11/02/2023 — Hampton, VA @ Hampton Coliseum
11/03/2023 — Raleigh, NC @ PNC Arena
11/05/2023 — Birmingham, AL @ Avondale Brewing Company
11/06/2023 — Atlanta, GA @ Coca Cola Roxy
11/08/2023 — Dallas, TX @ South Side Ballroom
11/09/2023 — Austin, TX @ Moody Center
11/10/2023 — Houston, TX @ 713 Music Hall
11/13/2023 — Denver, CO @ Fillmore Auditorium
11/16/2023 — Los Angeles, CA @ The Kia Forum
11/18/2023 — San Francisco, CA @ Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
11/20/2023 — Brooklyn, NY @ Barclays Center
11/22/2023 — Philadelphia, PA @ Wells Fargo Center
Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
When rappers are in the midst of their fame, such as Lil Uzi Vert, a few weeks into their release of the Pink Tape, they have to flex. Lil Uzi is enjoying the success of the latest album drop, and they are letting their Instagram fans know about it. “Not 2 much Na!” reads the caption, along with a wolf emoji. The photos are of Lil Uzi lounging across two charter airplane seats. Fat stacks of cash cover both their body and the table in front of him.
The Philly native also threw out pictures and videos of their shows that have recently been turned up. And with sales projections for Pink Tape looking very impressive, Lil Uzi is looking for something no true hip-hop album has ever done: Make it number one on the Billboard 200. While it would be an impressive feat, it would make sense if it was Lil Uzi. They might be the best rapper in the world right now, with a meteoric rise in their career since 2020, when the artist rereleased their 2016 mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World 2.
Wearing a black bunny mask and relaxing in the dough, Lil Uzi was tucking into one comfortable flight. What’s even more amazing is that they aren’t done making waves. They want to release their latest project, 222, soon. Other rappers, like Lil Tjay, are worried they’ll drop it on the same day or time as their own albums. But Lil Uzi Vert made it clear: They’d give the people what “they really want” if Pink Tape hit certain criteria. It looks like Pink Tape is going to surpass lofty projections, meaning Uzi could drop 222 any time now.
They’ve been in the rap game since 2010, but it wasn’t until their 2020 double-whammy that they achieved astronomical fame. First, they released the album Eternal Atake, which debuted at number one on the Billboard 200. Second, their updated mixtape (mentioned above) surpassed all streaming markers at the time. (This was most likely due to the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.) People have listened to a ton of Lil Uzi since the coronavirus came onto the scene. And the rapper has been dealing with a sick amount of cash.
Speaking on the We Are Florida podcast, YouTube personality and comedian Charleston White opened up about the current events in pop culture, especially the hip-hop community. After dismissing the 2023 BET Awards — “I ain’t into that bullsh*t” — they got onto the topic of Lil Uzi Vert. His latest album, Pink Tape, dropped recently. The second track on the list, “Suicide Doors,” features a rant White did speaking on Lil Uzi. “But I know he a sissified-looking n*gga that put fingernail polish on his motherfucking nails and wear dresses,” White says in the intro to the song.
While Lil Uzi Vert could’ve been really mad about Charleston White going after his manhood, he instead used it as the intro to one of the most important tracks on his album. Not only that, he has to pay him royalty checks for using his voice. “Yeah, I’m happier than a b*tch,” White says on the podcast when asked about his reaction. He explains that Vert’s people contacted him for permission to feature his rant on the song, and they ended up cutting White a “pretty nice check,” with future publishing checks on the way.
Charleston is incredibly grateful for the rapper including him on the tracklist, saying that he really blessed his game. “Shout out to [Lil Uzi Vert],” Charleston White said on the pod. “Cause I wasn’t speaking [favorably] of him, right? So he could’ve got [offended] and be like, ‘Nah, f*ck that [guy].” Getting paid by a guy you were dissing not too long ago? That’s one hell of a flex by the number-one rapper in the world right now.
The podcast episode features a lot of White-hot takes, including being out on award shows. Charleston White is also not a fan of football or basketball. Considering he just had five shows in Jacksonville, FL, it seems like he’s too busy to worry himself about other areas of popular culture. However, he’s overall pleased to be on a Lil Uzi Vert track. (Especially if the money keeps pouring in.)
Earlier this year, I was faced with a surreal, worlds-collide moment when Lil Uzi Vert popped out at Wrestlemania at the SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles to perform their increasingly inescapable hit “Just Wanna Rock.” Just a month before, I had seen him perform the same song during his sub-headlining set at Rolling Loud, basically at the same venue, just outside. The first time, I was there to cover the music; the second, I’d been invited by a wrestling-obsessed friend who had floor seats for the main event.
Here we are, three months later, and Uzi’s new album, Pink Tape, features a similar dizzying moment of professional and personal crossover. The late-album song “Nakamura” actually samples the ring entrance music of WWE wrestler Shinsuke Nakamura, someone Uzi undoubtedly sees as something of a kindred spirit. Wrestlers, in general, are kind of weird (to me), but Nakamura takes it a step further with flamboyant, borderline androgynous ring gear and a demeanor somewhere between very intense and incredibly stoned.
Rap fans love to talk about what “the Rap Game needs” because rap fans love to complain about what the “Rap Game” isn’t. The format has evolved so much from what it once was that its followers often feel caught in the lurch between always chasing the newest, latest thing and nostalgically wishing to return to the moment the genre was perfect for what they wanted (coincidentally, this time always seems to overlap with whenever a particular listener happened to be in eighth grade). Thank God we have Lil Uzi Vert, who can do both.
When Uzi first popped up on the scene from the primordial soup of SoundCloud, old-school rap heads were furious. Here was this kid from the streets of Philadelphia who seemingly bought all their clothes from Hot Topic and had pink dreads and facial piercings, as prone to yowling into the mic for extended bouts or hypnotically repeating a seemingly nonsense phrase over and over as spit a hot 16 full of punchlines and gun talk. Uzi wasn’t “real hip-hop,” and certainly couldn’t really rap. Except that Uzi was as much real hip-hop as the yay-slanging studio gangsters of yesteryear and actually could really rap their ass off if they wanted to — they just didn’t think they had to.
Now that Uzi is an established fixture of the hip-hop mainstream, they could have laid off the wild stylistic experimentation, gotten complacent, and just continued doing the same stuff that got them here. Instead, on Pink Tape they are doing stuff like covering System Of A Down’s signature hit “Chop Suey,” which has experienced a resurgence in popularity thanks to Zoomers on TikTok — people that grew with Lil Uzi Vert as their musical heroes the way millennials did with Jay-Z. Is it nostalgia that drove Uzi to record the cover or contemporary awareness? Who cares? It’s cool, whatever we who grew up on the original think.
Uzi straddles multiple genres across Pink Tape, opening the album with in-your-face braggadocio raps and immediately swerving into screeching trap metal on the very next song. There are screaming electric guitars and thundering 808s, futuristic anime references, squeaky voice crooning (645AR is somewhere punching the air), Eiffel 65 samples, horror-movie strings, and more. If anything here isn’t your cup of tea, don’t worry — something on the tape probably is.
The “rap game” — an inaccurate moniker, shout out to Vince Staples — needs artists like Lil Uzi Vert to remind us that hip-hop has always been on the cutting edge, not stuck in the same, capitalism-serving patterns of “what works” (read: sells) already. That hip-hop was always for weirdos and misfits who did stuff like watch wrestling and read comics and played video games. Busta Rhymes once name-checked Hacksaw Jim Duggan; the Wu-Tang Clan members gave themselves nicknames like Tony Stark and Johnny Blaze; The Notorious B.I.G. started a verse boasting he had a Super Nintendo and a Sega Genesis.
Somewhere along the way as we grow up, we get stuck in what rap used to sound like and start thinking that’s the only thing it should ever sound like. Uzi’s primal scream, anything-goes, try-it-and-see-if-it-sticks approach to music is here to shake us out of that complacency and boredom. Even if it doesn’t always work — let’s keep it real: most of this isn’t really for me, personally — it’s there to open up a new avenue that hasn’t been tried yet. It’s there to pay homage to what did work but to ask, “What if we tried something new?” Lil Uzi Vert indulges all their impulses to make it possible to see what happens like Nakamura climbing to the top rope. You don’t know what you’re going to see next, but you know it’s going to be special.
Pink Tape is out now via Atlantic.
Lil Uzi Vert is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Rolling Loud took the international stage by storm in 2023, captivating rap music fans with multiple festivals set in unique locations. The second annual Rolling Loud Portugal commenced on the beautiful beaches of Portimão along Portugal’s southern Algarve coast, drawing thousands of enthusiastic fans from across Europe.
The opening day of Rolling Loud Portugal 2023 showcased a lineup of exceptional artists who electrified the crowd. Travis Scott headlined the festival, delivering a memorable performance featuring hits from his extensive career. His set incorporated a stage design inspired by his forthcoming album, UTOPIA, adding an extravagant touch to the show. Lil Uzi Vert enchanted the audience with tracks from his recently released Pink Tape, while UK rapper Central Cee ignited the stage with hits from the collaborative Split Decision EP with Dave. Latto represented the Dirty South with her unique style and energy.
In addition to established artists, Rolling Loud Portugal provided a platform for underground heroes and rising stars. Rappers from Playboi Carti’s OPIUM label, including Destroy Lonely, Ken Carson, and Homixide Gang, delivered memorable performances. Luh Tyler, a newly-minted XXL freshman, impressed with one of his first international sets. The festival also showcased talents like Italy’s Rondodasosa, Portugal’s Wet Bed Gang and T-Rex, and rising American stars Bktherula and Eem Triplin, who brought out a special guest appearance by $NOT.
Rolling Loud Portugal’s picturesque setting and diverse lineup created an energetic and unforgettable experience for rap music enthusiasts.
Shortly after the release of the long-awaited Pink Tape, Lil Uzi Vert has already begun teasing another upcoming album. Uzi previously noted that Pink Tape would not be getting a deluxe edition — breaking tradition with many recent new releases — and that they would instead put out a whole new album. This is similar to what they did in 2020 with Eternal Atake, whose “deluxe edition” turned out to be a completely different album titled LUV Vs. The World 2.
It seems Uzi is starting a new tradition because they have changed their Instagram bio to read “Luv is rage 3,” suggesting another sequel to their 2015 debut mixtape is on the way. Considering how quickly Uzi turned around LUV Vs. The World 2 — which came out just a week after Eternal Atake — perhaps fans won’t have to wait very long to find out. Uzi first teased Luv Is Rage 3 in 2020, so they’ve had plenty of time to get it done. If Uzi continues in the same vein they did back in 2020, a potential Luv Is Rage 3 could have a completely different sound from Pink Tape.
Lil Uzi Vert’s The Pink Tape is currently on top of the world, but Uzi is teasing more music. Hitting his Instagram stories, Lil Uzi Vert teases for forthcoming music.
“Get this 2 number one And I will drop the album The album yall really looking for ,” Uzi wrote on Instagram. Found in his bio is “Luv is Rage 3.”
Lil Uzi Vert’s The Pink Tape is projected to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, ending a drought for rap albums on top of the charts. The first-week figure is projected for over 200K units.
“Get this 2 number one and i will drop the album y’all really looking for”
The new release is a massive 26 tracks deep and brings in Nicki Minaj, Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Bring Me The Horizon, and BABYMETAL. The new album features the uber-popular single “Just Wanna Rock”
According to Billboard, before the launch of the album Lil Uzi Vert hosted a prom-themed album listening party at Irving Plaza in New York City, with Lil Baby and City Girls’ JT on hand.
Gibson Hazard directs the animated trailer and shows the “Just Wanna Rock” rapper preparing for a final battle after ousting all his other animated opps after his pink diamond is removed from his forehead.
And I will drop the album The album yall really looking for 
