At Fortune Sound Club on Friday, January 23

All it takes for me to happily stumble out of an upstart rapper’s club gig is a performance longer than 15 minutes and the performer’s demonstrating that she did a modicum of research on Vancouver by complimenting our weed or the mountains or some shit like that. Tink ticked those boxes and then some at Fortune Sound Club for Happy Ending Fridays. Too bad Vancouver missed the Wikipedia article on her and slept on this show—wait, she doesn’t have one.

Allow me to do my best here, then. Born Trinity Home, this Chi-town native can sing, rap, and write great lyrics while looking good—an #ootd post on Instagram of the evening’s attire yielded an impressive 4,400+ likes and offers from bedroom producers to send her some beats. She’s okay in that department, though, as Timbaland recently signed her to his label and is producing her debut album. Oh, and she’s only 19. Feel like an inadequate bag of failure who pissed away your youth yet?

Perhaps the city’s weekend warriors weren’t up for Round 2 after Fortune’s fifth-anniversary debauch, which happened the previous evening and featured performances by Machine Gun Kelly and the “Thong Song” guy. On this night, the club was sparsely populated by infuriatingly young, well-dressed bad bitches, man-bun sporters, scenesters, and hip-hop heads ordering porn-star shooters by the dozen. (“They’re gross,” cautioned one bartender.)

At 12:30 it was go time. Unfortunately, the show’s opener, local rapper Tommy Genesis, had no business performing in front of people, including ones with man buns, in a choice time slot at one of the city’s most usually raucous nights. Her embarrassingly awkward set was a buzzkill regardless of how many porn stars you’d consumed, and it deflated what could have been a great party like… Can anyone think of a recent, high-profile example of a deflating? I’m drawing a total blank.

Things got markedly better when DJ Reese took to the decks and got a now-thinner crowd back into it with killer tracks such as Rae Sremmurd’s “No Type”, Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle”, and Bobby Shmurda’s hit song whose title I just wouldn’t feel comfortable typing out.

Close to 1 a.m., Tink took the stage for her first show ever outside the States in her 4,400+ likes getup and whipped her braids around while performing “Kilo”. She asked, “Can we turn the fuck up? I’m from Chicago and I wanna turn up,” before launching into “Dat Ain’t Me” and “Kardashian”.

People weren’t feeling it, and the most turned-up moment of her set was when DJ Reese dropped “California Love” during a brief interlude. Despite repeated, unsuccessful attempts to set it off with her rapping, it was a different story when Tink slowed things down to sing her R&B jams. Her I-need-a-man-to-love-me-for-who-I-am anthem “Treat Me Like Somebody” and the I-still-wanna-be-with-you-even-though-I-know-you’re-a-cheating-piece-of-shit confessional “Don’t Tell Nobody” got all the fellas giving elevator eyes to all the swooning ladies. It was time to grind.

Despite finishing a 25-minute set with her aggressive I-don’t-give-a-fuck-so-get-out-of-my-face-bitches banger “Fingers Up”, Tink thanked those still remaining and acknowledged that she does, in fact, give a fuck about her fans and Vancouver. As she and her DJ exeunted stage left, O.T. Genasis’s “CoCo” started playing and likely gave those looking to party until the wee hours a eureka moment that they should track down some stimulants.

To the delight of whoever’s job it is to clean Fortune, there were probably fewer soiled thongs and vomit stains to clean up on this evening than the big one prior. While we did get a happy ending, it might have been a bit premature. However, Tink will be back soon enough with a full-length album and a lengthy Wikipedia page. Best stock up on Kleenex in the meantime.