Up in Smoke Tour tour ends

Why it matters

The Up in Smoke Tour wrapped August 19, 2000, in Phoenix, after 44 dates. The tour had run a little over two months. Nobody had been arrested. Nobody had been hospitalized. The roster all left the road on speaking terms. That last sentence is the part that mattered, in 2000, for the rap-touring business. The Hard Knock Life Tour the year before had proven arena hip-hop could be commercially viable; Up in Smoke confirmed it. By the time the tour ended in Phoenix, the rap industry's collective working theory of large-format touring had been reset, more or less permanently. Insurance underwriters did not want a third proof point after this. Promoters started routing every major rap act through the same Sony Pictures and Live Nation pipelines other genres had been using for decades. The next twenty-five years of rap touring (Eminem's Anger Management Tour, 50's Massacre run, the various Drake stadium runs, Kendrick's Big Steppers Tour) run on the precedent set by the two summers, 1999 and 2000, that ended without anybody getting hurt. You can argue that fact made more money for the genre than any single album did. You would not be wrong.