You probably haven’t heard this from an earnest male college student, so please allow me to fill you in: Kanye Omari West is a musical genius. His albums? Straight fire, bro. He’s a visionary. He’s changed the game. Also, you should watch “Breaking Bad.”
Kanye West has been an excellent artist for so long that even the qualities that make him a star—his abrasive, unabashed over-sharing; his genre-defining records; his compulsive need to convey his Struggle—lend themselves to compliments bordering on banal.
“Dude, ‘Yeezus’ was so minimalist.” “‘Famous’ is meta AF.” “What’s your favorite? Mine’s ‘Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.’”
For a decade and a half, West has been the rhetorically gifted best man giving a wedding speech he knows is ten minutes too long. He also knows the audience won’t care. We don’t, and we shouldn’t. The indulgent spectacle is just as important as the performance.
In July, when I noticed West had begun selling tickets to his Saint Pablo tour date in Washington, D.C. (coincidentally the same weekend I was to attend a function nearby), I didn’t hesitate. The thought that I would drive nine hours in a weekend to squint at Ye from the very back row of the upper deck did not enter my mind as I confirmed the purchase. Sometimes, you just have to be in the building.
As my friend and I scaled the Verizon Center upper deck Thursday night, we couldn’t help but try to anticipate the forthcoming psychotic pageant. We speculated about who might open for Kanye. We both liked 2016’s “The Life of Pablo,” but we thought West had released better; would Ye play recent stuff or dip into his Deepwater Horizon-esque well of hits?
The lights went down. A few moments of silence. Over the darkened screams, barely audible, strains of Pastor T.L. Barrett’s “Father I Stretch My Hands” greeted the euphoric crowd. The music began to loop. Kanye’s iconic “Father Stretch My Hands Part 1” production merged seamlessly with Barrett’s soul, culminating in the explosive opening of one of West’s finest songs.
Kanye, illuminated by a single dark yellow beam of light, sauntered onto a platform which proceeded to float back and forth over the standing seating for the next two hours. The visually distorted televisions that broadcast his performance to the cheap seats remained focused only on that immobile beam of light. West was only visible when he chose to dance into the murky yellow.
West was the opener. The closer, too. I’ve never been to a more thrilling concert. Kanye played everything: 32 songs (12 from “Pablo”); covers of Drake, Schoolboy Q and Chief Keef; at least one song from each of his albums; “Flashing Lights,” one of the great underplayed songs in his repertoire and “Gold Digger,” a tune he has said he, for some reason, dislikes.
We were treated to a healthy dose of unpredictable Kanye insanity, too. A few bars into “Power,” he shut down the beat (and with it, the orgasmic crowd) and reiterated how much the lyrics he wrote mean to him.
“Do it better than anybody you ever seen do it,” he said slowly, waiting in vain for affirmation that might somehow be greater than tens of thousands of people screaming those words during his first, aborted attempt to play the song.
Over the chords of the beautifully tender “Only One,” West auto-tuned for a couple dozen minutes about a potpourri of Kanye-spirational topics: Wednesday’s Yeezy Season 4 fashion show; how he only gets in trouble “when he’s sticking up for the little guy;” Wal-Mart.
It’s easy to write off these improvisational moments as childishly myopic, but even through all of West’s dense self indulgence came some rays of lucidity. He gave a soberly self-aware assessment of the central argument of many of his critics: “Why doesn’t Kanye ever talk about stuff that matters?”
To paraphrase his Ye-to-Ye answer, Kanye believes that if it matters to you, it matters. There is something inside each of us that transcends time and space. For Kanye, it’s his work, which, somewhat paradoxically, includes promoting the shallowest things about himself. The haters aren’t telling him to change because they care about the causes he could be championing with his money and influence, they just want him to stop being him.
“The biggest lie is the physical,” West said during the lengthy rant. He had lost the crowd minutes ago.
Whether you think Kanye’s point is valid or not, you have to admire the aesthetic skill of a man who can showcase his vision with such precision. After all, Kanye West was barely a physical presence throughout his show. Rather than shining lights on himself, the bottom of his floating platform lit the moshing spectacle beneath him. Those who spent thousands of dollars on seats probably had a similar concert experience as those of us who sat in the nosebleeds. The concert was about him, so it was about us.
We couldn’t see Kanye, and we couldn’t even really feel him. We were too busy feeling ourselves; screaming along to the sometimes problematic words of one of our time’s most confounding and brilliant figures.
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