At GM Place on Saturday, January 24

Lil Wayne tore through Vancouver last Saturday on his I Am Music tour, less a rapper than a newfangled kind of rock star. With hip-hop mired in an artistic and commercial lull, the New Orleans native has become the genre’s biggest-selling artist by distancing himself from some of its most telling signifiers. Fashion-wise, for instance, the ink-stained Wayne wears the kind of low-slung but not-too-baggy jeans skateboarders wear, flashy belt buckles that a Hells Angel might own, and the slim-fitting T-shirts indie rockers cherish. Persona-wise, too, the man born Dwayne Carter defies the hip-hop norm; he’s a creepy, gnomish-looking man with a voice that croaks, cackles, and wheezes its way through the wires, less like LL Cool J than an African-American version of Tom Waits.

Rap hasn’t produced a superstar this weird since the death of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, from whom Wayne seems to have borrowed his antic blurting and keen taste for absurdity. ODB never played sold-out hockey arenas with a rock band and flame-throwing cannons backing him, though—proof enough that Weezy’s managed a noble feat of his own: he’s made weird cool.

While he freed himself from some of rap’s conventions—by singing, however poorly, and pretending to play guitar—Wayne left the sense of a performer who’s done away with clichés but hasn’t figured out what to replace them with. There were lulls aplenty during his set, some planned (as when he showcased the meagre vocal skills of his three weed carriers), others not (an ill-advised ballad wherein he magnanimously declared himself capable of loving anyone, even a prostitute).

Sticking to a set list drawn mostly from last year’s Tha Carter III—his sixth and biggest album—the dreadlocked MC practically shunned the mix-tape material on which he stakes his “best rapper alive” claim. Thus were we treated to all three verses of TC3’s “Shoot Me Down”, a song that even the members of Linkin Park might find a touch overblown. Still, Weezy’s a hell of a performer, a writhing, screeching hyena of a man with a devil perched on one shoulder and an angel on the other. That he’s a superstar is simply remarkable, a sign teenagers might finally be rejecting the industry’s spoonfeeding.

Where Wayne exudes black-comic intensity, his frequent collaborator T-Pain radiates down-home affability, a regular-guy persona weirdly at odds with his chilly digital croon. Sporting a series of baroque top hats, the Florida native presided over a small-scale circus, dancing better and more frequently than he sang, but mostly deferring to a gaggle of performers, including stilt walkers, fire twirlers, and a krumping sideman made up like the whiteface gunmen in Dead Presidents. Less a set of songs than a chintzy vaudeville act, Pain’s performance reached a climax halfway through when he announced the appearance of a special guest, Britney Spears, and gleefully looked on as a middle-aged dwarf scurried on-stage in a red PVC bodysuit to perform a brief striptease. On a night when the headliner aimed high and missed his mark, and his counterpart barely bothered to perform at all, that tiny woman walked away with the show.