REVIEW AND PHOTOS: Pitbull brings the Miami heat with T-Pain at SPAC

SARATOGA SPRINGS — Despite it being cool and mild, SPAC was hot, hot, hot on Sunday night. You could say, coyly, that it was as if someone had poured gasolina generously all over the place and turned the amphitheater into a fireball. With its vibrant reggaeton house beats, catchy hooks, SPAC didn’t feel like a concert venue — Latin hip-hop rapper and singer superstar Pitbull ignited Saratoga Springs into a South Beach dance club with 20,000 of my closest strangers. And it was an absolute blast.

First opened by two DJs, Globalization DJ and DJ LAZ, I admittedly scoffed at the idea of being “opened” by two DJs — I had a single bad experience with a lackluster DJ preceding a headliner once. But now, after having attended this dance hall extravaganza, it was foolish of me to be so dismissive of the value a good DJ (or two) can bring simply by turning the audience’s experience into a dance party. Really drives home the need of being warmed up for an artist like Pitbull, or his actual supporting artist, rapper T-Pain.

At the beginning, this show was honestly the first one where it felt weird for me to be there; it felt alien to be in the audience, and it was weird to not be dancing — I generally don’t dance at shows anyway. Furthermore, it was even weirder (to me) for T-Pain to be on this massive stage, flanked only by (another DJ?) who served up the backing tracks to all of T-Pain's performances. There was no band to support him. And as started by Globalization, continued by LAZ, and then onto T-Pain, the audience was wild. It was hard to say which songs had the audience dancing … because they all did, and I saw hands waving joyously all the way to the farthest reaches of the lawn.

A few minutes prior to Pitbull’s start time, the power in the venue flickered. Us in the press badges looked at each other like, “Did you see that?” Lo and behold, we were soon informed that the stage had suffered some sort of power outage and had to switch to the generator backup, requiring a complete reboot and recalibration. I wondered if the generators were able to support the kind of show I was envisioning.

As Mr. Worldwide took the stage, that thought persisted as the full range of his production unfolded. But admittedly, the thought eventually fell to the wayside, as did my remembering to take notes. Why? Because I ended up just losing myself in the show. I got caught up in my own bouncing and dancing, shouting “FIREBALL!” and “TIMBER” and “DAME MÁS GASOLINA!”

240908_Pitbull_SPAC (6).jpg — Pitbull performs at Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024.
Elissa Ebersold

Pitbull performs at Saratoga Performing Arts Center on Sunday, Sept. 8, 2024.
Elissa Ebersold

Pitbull is, at least in my experience, is more often remembered as a featured artist on a track and not so much the title artist (non-disrespectfully), but you wouldn’t have known it based on the full package production he put on last night. He had a full band and a DJ to accompany him with the fun tracks of everything he’d ever been involved with, but it was so much more than that. It was a massively complex display. He had beautiful, scantily-clad dancers in shimmering, barely-there costumes whipping their hair in meticulously choreographed dance sequences.

There were huge LED displays with vivid, colorful, and fun animations. There were frequent bursts of cryo cannons and crazy pyrotechnics. And Mr. 305 jumped and gyrated with nearly the same frequency as his dancers, albeit with considerably more clothing — sporting his quintessential soigné outfit of sunglasses, button down, and slacks. If you weren’t sure that this was his costume, the hundreds of other Pitbull look-alikes (male, female, and everyone else in between) in the audience would have made sure you knew, wearing their own versions of that same outfit.

Every time I looked around me and noticed the wide range of characters dancing and singing along in the audience, I was surprised at the diversity. But as the evening went on, it became more and more clear that everybody just wanted to come out, have a good time, dance, and feel alive. The way Pitbull and T-Pain and the dancers bopping about the stage made the whole scene electric cannot be understated. The way the energy permeated my body, someone who isn’t too keen being at a club, and made me dance and jump and sing along until my poor old knees were crackling like Rice Krispies and hurting enough to crawl into bed later with a pain killer, cannot be understated. It was infectious. It was intense.

Trust me, I’m just as surprised as you when I say this: It was one of the best shows I’ve been to.

Note: I was unable to obtain or find a setlist for either T-Pain or Pitbull for this tour. However, given that I recognized most of each artists’ music, you could probably just click on “Most Popular” in Spotify and get fed an algorithm-powered setlist, more or less.