How many bands can stop an audience of frenzied manic fans with one note on a piano? Some 80 minutes into Kanye West’s epic set closing out the final day of Governor’s Ball 2013, that’s just what he did. Pling. And silence. Everybody holds their breath. Pling again. The penultimate moment of three days of thrills, spills and chills (I myself saw sixteen bands) boiled down to a single note on a piano. Look atcha, indeed.
Some eight hours earlier I arrived at Randall’s Island, a little the worse for wear for what amounted to the iffiest program of the long weekend, for me at least, mostly because I’d already seen everybody I actually wanted to see in the past year.
Gary Clark Jr was finishing off his set as I walked in. I didn’t hear much but what I heard was Clark in full blues stretch on “Bright Lights, Big City”, I cursed him one time and I moved on (Grade: A)
Moved on to Yeasayer who must have performed “Ambling Alp” though I missed it. The indie hipsters were everything I was worried they might be, boring so tuneful walls of sound (Grade: C-) and I left quickly to see Beirut who were also just about what you thought they’d be only much much better(Grade: B+): all wind instruments and subdued beauty, Beirut sounded like a Mariachi band being mugged by Animal Collective. I thought I knew their material but I guess it didn’t stick but would be happy to make their acquaintance more fully in a venue they deserve, like Town Hall or Beacon.
The Lumineers set was packed out and while I can’t stand the band in practice, in theory I kinda like the idea of a mediocre folk band getting a left field hit single and blasting to the top of the charts. 77M streams on Spotify for “Ho Hey”! It is strange they weren’t playing the larger stage, they certainly needed it. They were awful. I reviewed the album over a year ago and it made zero impression on me and that certainly hasn’t changed. Weak gruel of songs with little singalongs. The band wore sunglasses and the nadir, a terrible cover of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” so weak it was a disgrace. The best? “Flowers In Her Hair” where Neya performed a pleasant little hippie folkie dance. Terrible band, yes? But what the hell, at least they are real (Grade: D+). I went across the island and finished off Grizzly Bears set on the main stage. I had seen them, and liked them, last year at Radio City Music Hall and they were essentially playing the same set. “Here is the festival banger” Daniel Rossen cracked (Grade: B)
Now I had a choice. Check out the xx, who I saw, and loved, earlier this year at Hammerstein or jockey for position for Kanye. There was only one reason I bought a VIP three day pass to Governor’s Ball and that was to check out Kanye again, nearly six months to the day he blew ne away at “12-12-12”. Easily the best thing, indeed just about the only living thing, at the Hurricane Sandy benefit, West’s set was considered a failure. It was anything but. An intense 12 minutes of hard bass and rapping over some of the greatest hip hop tracks of the 21st Century. No platitudes, no we are all in this together. Not a word. He just rapped nonstop and left the stage.
So with his new album Yeejus due to drop on June 18th, I wanted another look at how he was gonna handle it now. So I stayed where I was and ended up some ten rows from the stage, leaning on the fence of the VIP section, then a space, and then the rest of the audience. The 110 minutes before the set dragged on and on as people pushed and pushed and pushed. There is no way to see Governor’s Ball without either VIP tickets or choosing your band and waiting it out. If you do the latter, you miss a lot of bands.
But the question was: what can be expect from Kweezy? Actually, the “12-12-12” set was a dry run for this one: 5 new songs, 16 hits, all killer, no filler. The first five from the main stage and the rest from a small stage which put me in the front row, to the left, behind him though he played to both sides. One disappointing rant about how Kanye didn’t care about radio play or sales any more didn’t make for any controversy on his 36th birthday.
So what it means to say that “12-12-12” was a dry run is that neither show had guest stars, neither show haw a full band, everything was programmed and pre-recorded except for the beats and the rapping. Kanye used a phaser on his voice and let it echo through some tracks and double tracked himself on others, the effect has been called industrial but that was more true of the “Black Skinhead” and “New Slave” opening which is a thunderous rap eschewing House for Industrial strength beats. With the two biggest statements of the night out of the way, Kanye had the audience eating out of the palm of his hand (from where I am standing at least, with the fanatics!), screaming along to “mercy” and “Cold” and a little later one of the best songs of the night, “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”. Kanye performed a surprising 4 songs off Graduation, only 3 from My Beautiful Dark Fantasy, 2 off College Dropout, 2 off 808s And Heartbreaks, 3 singles, 4 off Cruel Summer and 5 from Yeezus .
Kanye is a great rapper but he isn’t ABOUT rapping, he is a songwriter and his raps are all lyrics in disguise. A black eccentric not a million miles away from Marvin Gaye, he has all the swag and swagger of a Jay-Z with little of the pleasure. Songs like “Power” are not about pleasure in power, Kanye is riddled with ambiguity though in his heart of hearts he feels victimized and it is this huge gulf between what he is and what he thinks it is that makes his songs such overwhelming psychodramas. He pulled it off Sunday night by giving it all to the songs, by keeping the drama on stripped down tracks of steel.
So Kweezy can come off as kinda cold, misanthropic, but last night he had the audience join him for his painful love songs. “Heartless” was a stirring singalong with him handing the hook to the audience and feeding back off us. It was expansive, moving and if the set can feel like a round up of hits the intensity of the performance left little doubt: for Kanye this was what it is all about.
The internal tick tock of placing “Flashing Lights” before “All Of The Lights” is typical of what he is doing. The last song is a reprise of “Black Skinhead” and sends us home with the bass and drums pounding in our ears. But what Kanye really left us with was that pling on the piano introducing “Runaway”. Kanye stretches and stretches the song and adds a coda claiming true love, “If you are with with someone you love tonight, hold on to em real tight” Kanye sings, sending us home from three days of music and mud, torrential rains, and overcrowding, with love on our mind.
Grade: A