One of the hottest acts in country, Florida Georgia Line, has still got the whiskey drinking, mama praising, church-going country music themes, but don’t be fooled. This duo is on tour with a rapper and…it works.
Florida Georgia Line or FGL took over the BOK Center Thursday night in a flash of blue, bursts of flames and whip of a black curtain. The band made-up of Florida native, Brian Kelley, and Georgia native Tyler Hubbard — hence the groups name — welcomed a Tulsa crowd with the title track from their 2014 album “Anything Goes.”
For supposedly country artists, Kelley and Hubbard didn’t adhere to a uniform of boots or a 10-gallon-hat. Instead, Kelley jived around stage in white skinny jeans, a distressed denim vest and a brown felt hipster-esque hat while Hubbard sagged black skinny jeans, a sleeveless sweatshirt, gold chain and a backwards baseball cap.
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Country has never looked so different or so hip.
The duo followed up their opener with two of their older songs, “It’z Just What We do” and “Round Here,” after which they signed and gave away a black acoustic guitar to a young boy named Mason in the audience. In fact, children in the audience were plentiful.
The arena was filled with concert goers of all ages and styles from a classic wrangler and paisley button-down pairing to a crop top, daisy dukes and of course, cowboy boots.
While the group kept your ears ringing with more of a pop mix than a traditional George Strait like sound, Kelley and Hubbard did give an ode to their country forefathers with a shot of whiskey.
One of the neatest sets of the night included a forest of inflatable trees behind the stage for the song “Dig Your Roots.” For the next song, “Dirt,” the accompanying music video played in on the back drop featuring a Tim McGraw spot. And then the night took a turn for the sentimental.
Hubbard announced both his and Kelley’s wife was there for the evening. He asked the audience to join them in blowing the roof off the place with a love song. The two then sang “H.O.L.Y.” from their latest album “Dig Your Roots.” The song emphasized how effortlessly the harmonies between Hubbard and Kelley are — which provided a nice contrast to how high energy the rest of the set list was.
The homerun of the evening, without a doubt was the song “God, Your Mama, And Me” (originally recorded with the Backstreet Boys). A montage of Hubbard and Kelley’s wedding videos and other trips with their wives were played out on the big screen. Many an artist power through a set-list, yell out a few welcomes to the city and leave, but the bands choice to give concert-goers an inside look on their personal lives made the duo seem more relatable. Well played FGL, well played.
As Kelley and Hubbard wrapped-up the evening with “Get Your Shine On,” the rumor was their 2012 smash hit “Cruise” was going to end the night as the encore. The audience was joyfully wrong.
With a few pulses of all too familiar beats, beats reminiscent of 2002, rapper and opener Nelly took the stage to laughs and cheers for “Hot In Herre.”
On the outset, having a rapper open for country artists seems like a horrible mix-up, but the crowd was just as excited to sway and sing along to the long-time rapper. The pop-rapper took listeners down a tour of memory lane with hits such as “Shake Ya Tailfeather,” “Ride Wit Me,” “Only Just a Dream” and “Over and Over” — to name a few.
Nelly’s St. Louis roots are attributed as giving him the versatility to jump from genre to genre and he lived up to the hype. Putting the artist right before FGL came out didn’t seem like a far-fetched transition.
“Cruise” did turn out to be the last song of the night. Nelly and other opener Chris Lane came out to join FGL in the encore.
While all of the artists stood on stage swaying to the last song of the evening, it became apparent that crossing musical boundaries is what we should hope for. It may look wrong but, it feels really right.