Erykah Badu

The Hollywood Bowl is no stranger to star-studded bills like the one that filled its marquee on Highland Avenue on the penultimate day of September. But even with Erykah Badu & The Alchemist, DJ Pee .Wee (a.k.a. Anderson .Paak), and Flea on the lineup — plus guest appearances by Cordae, DRAM, DJ Creole Princess, Earl Sweatshirt, and Thundercat — the night's true headliner was Lauren Halsey. The visual artist from South L.A. turned the entire campus into emajendat (pronounced "imagine that"), a one-night takeover in which her art and the music onstage kept raising the stakes on each other until it was impossible to say which was serving which.

The transformation began well before showtime. From the moment the gates opened at 6 p.m., the Bowl's grounds doubled as a South Central block party, complete with a roller rink, a pop-up dance club, cartoonish sculptures, food, and merch booths awash in Halsey's signature technicolor. Even the Bowl's staff were decked out in emajendat shirts.

Halsey's immersive "funk garden" dates back to October 2024, when emajendat debuted as a gallery installation at Serpentine South in London. Bringing it to the Bowl meant adding live music, though Halsey is no stranger to that kind of accompaniment. This past March, her sister dreamer sculpture park opened near the corner of Western Avenue and 76th Street alongside a performance by Parliament-Funkadelic. She's also booked the likes of Doechii and Ms. Lauryn Hill to play her art shows.

Halsey herself was on hand but steered clear of the stage, leaving host Yvonne Orji and others to shout her out. She hardly needed the spotlight. Her work was everywhere it shone.

The music began with the Charles Gaines Collective with Black Nile and Devin Daniels, who played in front of a collaged curtain that kept the rest of Halsey's stage under wraps. Gaines, the conceptual artist who paced the collective on drums, was one of Halsey's teachers at CalArts, while Black Nile and Devin Daniels both hail from Inglewood. Together, they laid a smooth foundation for a sonically diverse evening, even slipping a bit of Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" into their jam.

Then the stage went dark and stayed that way for Flea. With longtime Red Hot Chili Peppers bandmate Anthony Kiedis in the crowd, the wily 63-year-old played alone, looping together snippets of bass, trumpet, and talk box vocals amid a cloud of manufactured fog — not to mention the various smoky smells emanating from the stands.

Halsey started to show her hand once DJ Pee .Wee took over. Part of her cubic, pyramid-shaped set came into view, while projection mapping turned the Bowl's shell into a canvas of shifting colors, textures, and patterns, Egyptian iconography included.

Of all the acts to perform amid Halsey's handiwork, nobody did more to turn the place into a party than Anderson .Paak's alter ego. When he wasn't spinning tracks from a DJ booth shaped like a rainbow version of his own wig-capped head, he sang and rapped his way through his own catalog, from Silk Sonic's "Fly as Me," "Leave the Door Open," and "Skate" to his solo hits "Am I Wrong" and "Come Down." Along the way, he brought out Cordae for their beloved collab "RNP," as well as the live debut of "A Good Day," the Bill Withers-sampling lead single from their joint album, Heavy Is the Crown, due out Oct. 23.

Before Badu took her turn, dancers from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy bridged the gap with a number of their own, their costumes picking up the Egyptian motifs that run through so much of Halsey's work.

Only then did Halsey reveal the full scope of her stage. Badu, in a metallic teal robe, stood framed by everything the cubes had been hiding, including giant polka dot mushrooms, a pharaoh-style bust in a rainbow-striped headdress, a silver sculpture in a tall Egyptian crown, and a towering figure covered in iridescent shards. Rainbow-striped cats and cutout palm trees lined the lip of the stage.

The "Queen of Neo-Soul" leaned heavily on Before the World Blows, her new collaborative album with The Alchemist, drawing 12 of the set's 16 songs from the record whose tour this show capped. She spent much of the night at the controls herself, toggling between a Sequential Prophet synth and a smaller keyboard to shape the sound behind her vocals alongside The Alchemist and her band. She brought out DJ Creole Princess for "I Just Play a Part" and DRAM for "Valentine," dipped into her own catalog for a mid-set run of "On & On," "Love of My Life (An Ode to Hip Hop)," and "Didn't Cha Know," and slipped bits of Elton John's "Bennie and the Jets" and OutKast's "So Fresh, So Clean" into "Breezy."

From there, the guests kept coming. Thundercat lent his unmistakably funky bass to "They Ain't You," and rapper Earl Sweatshirt spit bars on "I Know That Man." Then, for "Black Box," Flea joined the rest of the night's guests and openers behind Badu as fireworks burst over the shell. It was the one moment all night when every piece of emajendat truly came together.

For Badu, those pyrotechnics marked the end of her tour with The Alchemist. For Halsey, they may have been just the beginning. She’s expressed hope that the show will serve as a proof of concept for similar events, and even gone so far as to predict this night as the start of an annual music festival.

If the Bowl makes room for emajendat on its calendar every year, what Halsey calls "the people's venue" will have a new tradition to look forward to.

Imagine that.