Review: Mexico hip-hop star Peso Pluma soars in Minnesota debut, despite foot injury

Minnesota has never seen a hip-hop concert like the one Peso Pluma brought to town Friday night at Target Center. Here’s hoping we see more of where that came from.

The 1¾-hour performance by the Mexican rap star was a hyperactive super-hybrid of cultural influences from north and south of the border — part hip-hop dance party and mariachi orchestral concert, with a little rap-rock feistiness thrown in, too.

Born Hassan Emilio Kabande Laija, the 25-year-old rapper from Guadalajara roamed the stage with a large, wandering, mariachi-style acoustic band by his side featuring exuberant horns and traditional Mexican music instruments. He also performed over booming electronic beats with a large, high-energy dance troupe and artful stage lighting, at times recalling Kendrick Lamar’s recent concerts.

Clearly, though, Kendrick never had a tololoche on stage with him (Mexican-style standup bass).

The overwhelmingly Latino crowd of about 8,000 fans had to wait a long time to catch Pluma in person. He skipped Minnesota on several prior tours, a sign we’re still a fledgling Latino music concert market. When he finally announced his Target Center date for this past April, he postponed his tour for unclear reasons.

Luckily, the foot injury that he suffered in the interim did not delay the show further, but it did impact his performance Friday.

The lanky star still moved around and even danced on one foot a lot, but he was far from the pouncing, Mick Jagger-y dancer and strutter we’ve seen on TV. He used a walking cane part of the time, and he also intermittently sat down on the leather and gold throne on which he rose up from under the stage at the start of the show.

Nobody seemed to mind Pluma’s condition. The crowd jumped up excitedly upon his arrival and sang along loudly to the opening songs, “La Patrulla” and “La Durango,” both from his barely month-old fourth album “Exodo.” Translation: “Exodus,” a title reflecting on Pluma’s escape from the drug cartel culture around northern Mexico and other societal problems he sings about in his songs.

Nor did the crowd seem to mind that Pluma is far from a gifted vocalist. His voice is gravely, nasally and kind of pipsqueak-y, like a cross between rapper DMX and Pee Wee Herman. Chalk it up to one more thing that makes him truly unique. He makes up for it with an actor-like dramatic delivery and bad-boyish charisma, and with some mighty strong song hooks, too.

The set list was split up into four different acts, the third of which started with “Mala” under a deluge of devil-red stage lighting and Pluma’s band nowhere in sight. This was the grinding dance-club portion of the show. It grew even more sultry and heavy in “Quema,” a hard-thumping rager that found the whole crowd bouncing along excitedly.

What a great contrast to go straight from the electro-thumping of that segment to the hard string-picking virtuosity in the next part, a full-blown mariachi montage featuring the band and little else. Songs like “Rosa Pastel” and the fun new gem “Hollywood” came across like ultra-passionate corridors straight out of a movie-set border cantina.

Pluma’s band draped him in the Mexican flag at the end of the acoustic set, one of many times he proudly showed off or spoke of his roots. He also told the crowd how happy he was to be performing to so many Latinos way up in “Mini-sota,” as he pronounced it.

The last part of the concert blended all the various elements together into a thrilling, at times even sensory-overloading final stretch featuring some of his biggest hits, such as “El Azul” and the living-the-high-life anthem “Lady Gaga.” Pluma wound up sitting down for a lot of it, seemingly with his foot worn down. He may have been the only seated person in the room.