On Friday, Megan Thee Stallion took over the GMA Summer Concert Series stage after Thursday’s release of her sophomore album, Traumazine. Normally I wouldn’t be excited to take an Uber to Central Park at 6:45 in the morning on a Friday, but for Tina Snow, I did.
As I sat on a bench with other press outside the venue, I could hear the crowd screaming as sound check began. I could hear snippets of the Meg and Beyoncé “Savage” remix and “Body.” I heard her iconic “AHH” ring through the speakers, and it woke me up from my nearly asleep body. Remember, it was only 7 a.m., now.
The audio played on and off that way for another thirty minutes, with only a few of her most popular songs on loop. “I got a stank ass walk and a reckless ass mouth”—the opening line from fan favorite “Don’t Stop”—was screamed amongst the crowd, who never lost their energy, even when I assumed our queen wasn’t on stage.
As I walked up the stairs of the press platform, which was a couple of yards behind the audience, the “WAP” rapper’s five female backup dancers took to the stage. They wore lacey, black unitards, black combat boots, and booty-length braids. All of them walked up and interacted with the audience with the same confidence as their leader.
At 8 a.m., Thee Stallion walked on stage. She was tall, had the brightest smile, and a similar black, lacey fit as her dancers, as well as some skinny heels, to tower over everybody that joined her on stage; a true gentle giant.
The audience erupted with praise, and Meg responded by twerking in ways that I could never even dream of trying, while pointing back at the crowd, holding up the H-Town sign with her hands and sticking out her tongue.
The GMA show was set up to look like a full concert, but in reality, only about one minute of four-to-five songs were actually performed on stage, with interviews and audience participation in-between. And although it was a ticketed event, it was revealed by Meg that fellow hot girls stood in line as early as 3 a.m. to get a barricade spot.
At 8:30, she performed “Her,” from the new album, Traumatize, and it’s another braggadocious anthem for the hot girls. This song, along with all the others she performed, is filled with cuss words. And since Good Morning America is a morning show, Meg had to let the audience take over several lines of the songs. However, this never diminished the energy of the concert. Every ten minutes or so, she performed another song, yelling to the audience not to lose the energy between touch-ups. She performed “Body,” the “Savage” remix featuring Beyoncé (which every single person screamed the intro), and “Pressurelicious” featuring Future (which is from her new album).
During a short interview on stage with GMA’s TJ Homes, Megan explained that this new album is one of her first projects where she authentically expressed her emotions in her writing, saying, “So usually, I could be sad, and I could write a song like ‘Body,’ or I could be mad and write a song like ‘Big Ole Freak’. It’s clear that this album correlates with how she actually felt the moment she wrote the lyrics.
Traumatize comes after a long fight with her record label, 300 Entertainment; an upcoming trial against Tory Lanez, whom she has accused of shooting her in the feet after a party at Kylie Jenner’s house in July 2020; and after tragically losing both her mother and grandmother in 2019.
She passionately thanked her fans, snatching up phones for videos and snapping a few pictures on her own phone after she performed. She even asked a few people their names, as she knew that she had interacted with a few of them over social media. It felt like her fans were her family. Hopefully, this brief, early morning celebration after a turbulent and traumatizing past 3 years for Megan was a highlight for the H-Town Hottie.