The first time Kanye West speaks to us, really the only time Kanye actually speaks, and doesn’t scream to us, is to tell us something we already know. West was in London when somebody approached West and informed the rap superstar that his mother had died. West wrote “Coldest Winter” in response. You could argue that West wrote the entire 808s And Heartbreaks and began a career trajectory that would lead him to the Barclay Center in response to his mothers untimely passing. You could claim his slow but steady response to mortality was best summed up in the first song of 28 song set, “On Sight”: “how much do I not give a fuck?”
Well, how much doesn’t he give a fuck? Charging Arena size prices for Theater sized shadings, as guitarist Tomas Doncker noted looking at the spare stage and the spare band, a coupla keyboards, a part time guitarist, some dancers garbed as Priestess’ and Kanye himself, “He is making a lot of money here”. So he doesn’t care about stage craft dick measuring. It isn’t about staging, it isn’t about spectacle, it is about industrial size beats and “No New York” and, a name Tomas mentions, the German band Einstürzende Neubauten. Walls of shard sharp cold as ice, as the glacier pyramid on the main stage, a stage he seldom used performing most of the set from a trampoline mid floor. How much doesn’t Kanye West not give a fuck? “A billionaire gave me advise about my career. I call that free advise because it didn’t come with a check.” West is furious at the captain of industry but West point in his late show tirade is this: “What do I have to lose?” He Autotunes his voice all the way through the tirade.
The set began promptly at 915 and went through to 1120, West performed a 28 song set and the audience joined in…. often. It seems counter-intuitive but those of us who adore Yeezus the album adored it live and little things like West wearing a jewel encrusted mask (till a Jesus figure gives Yeezus his blessing late in the show) wouldn’t put us off. Tomas again: “the songs are not arranged like hip hop, they are arranged like rock, verse chorus verse” The mostly white middle class audience responds to what they understand and know taking off from the familial to places else.
Why the mask? Because the music is the message? A sneer at voyeurism, celebrityhood, Kanye’s own overblown choices, a studied and free concentration on noise and ideas? All these things, and more: as West anoints himself a genius, which he is of course, but only a musical genius, he throws out idea after idea after idea. On an LED Screen Kanye posts words:
Fighting
Rising
Falling
Searching
Finding
Not so much for us as for him: Tomas claims that the whole point of his art is some form of freedom from the enslavement of received ideas. The freedom to think wide and open and anywhere and for there to be a sound that releases it. In the evening’s poppiest moment, West introduces “Runaway” with a single ping on the piano before running away from the piano like Loki, a figure of mischief but also a figure of threat, it is like a ritual (the dancers also evolve into ritual). The arrangement is the same as the arrangement he performed at Gov’s Ball June 2013: he cuts and shreds it, and adds an ode to true love, or a hope of love at the end. It is fine, but I personally believe he should have performed a fuller version. Indeed, from time to time I am not certain he is making the choices we really want him to. He kills the hook, the “throwing it all away” on “Power”, he deconstructs “Mercy”. Tomas goes as far as to say that if a white person was performing he wouldn’t like it as much. “Having a black man doing whatever he wants means something to me…” Later Tomas would add “No dancing, no guests, none of that shit…”
Yes, exactly: this is as uncompromising a set as you will ever see. This is the third time I’ve seen Ye in less than a year. At the 12-12-12 set he performed 12 minutes of industrial strength hits in a leather kilt, absolutely brilliant (my grade: A) , than in June he closed the Gov’s Ball with a set even better than this. With zero effects whatsoever for the majority of the set, West moved on a tiny stage and performed a supreme dry run for this set. It seemed to me that West got the balance a little better at Gov’s Ball (Grade: A), it was relentless in its iced out cold fury.
Last night was nearly the equal of both: as Lou Reed noted in his review, this was about sound, like Metal Machine Music, it was powerful in its complete absorbing of music. I wrote a silly post yesterday about what if Kanye and Taylor toured together, but the truth is the two musicians are on a whole other level: they follow their music without compromise. They are both artists.
Taylor tells people to live their lives well and West tells his audience to live their lives free. The show at Barclay Center boiled down to one concept: As a black man Kanye West’s ancestors were slaves and treated as property and the ramifications still effect West and black people till this day. His response is make music to enforce his absolute refusal to be anything but free. West is the sound of freedom.
Grade: A