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Whatever Kanye West was paid to headline the first night of this weekend’s Rolling Loud California festival, it was easy money.
On stage for about an hour Thursday night with Ty Dolla Sign, his partner on the chart-topping album “Vultures 1,” released last month under the artist name ¥$, Kanye wandered around with a black jacket and a mask while their songs played. the festival’s sound system on a huge circular stage set up in the parking lot of Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.
If he was rapping, you couldn’t hear it; if she was holding a microphone, you wouldn’t be able to see it.
This type of performance is nothing new for the controversial rapper now known as Ye, who introduced his latest albums with high-profile listening events held in arenas and stadiums across the country. But Kanye’s booking to commemorate 10 years of Rolling Loud, the hip-hop record festival, with wildly popular editions in cities like Miami, New York and Los Angeles, was announced (or at least widely perceived to have been announced). ) as something different. : His first large-scale festival performance since the apparent collapse of his career after he made a series of anti-Semitic comments in late 2022.
Kanye West on stage on Thursday.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
You remember his claims about Jewish control of black voices; You will remember that on Twitter he promised to launch “death with 3 against the JEWISH PEOPLE.” His rhetoric cost him his relationships with his record label and her booking agent and led to the end of his highly lucrative deals with Adidas, Balenciaga, Gap and several other major companies. For a minute, Kanye looked cooked.
However, the 46-year-old musician, who apologized for his comments in December in an Instagram post written in Hebrew, has lately been on a comeback tour of sorts. “Vultures 1” spent two weeks atop the Billboard 200 last month, becoming Kanye’s first LP to repeat at No. 1 since “Watch the Throne” with Jay-Z in 2011. (He has said it will be released a second volume of “Vultures” soon.) Even more impressive, perhaps, her single “Carnival” hit No. 1 on the Hot 100 this week thanks in large part to the song’s health on streaming services like Spotify, where it racked up more than 191 million views.
Kanye’s last visit to the top spot as a lead artist? “Stronger”, back in 2007.
His appearance at Rolling Loud, which runs through Sunday with acts including Nicki Minaj, Post Malone and the duo of Future and Metro Boomin, was positioned as the next step in that narrative: a crucial opportunity to prove he can still do it. like a live act.
Maybe another time.
Instead of the expected performance, Kanye and Ty simply offered another listening session on Thursday, wandering around the stage while playing (well, while the sound system was playing) many of the songs from “Vultures 1.” Guests like Quavo and Freddie Gibbs joined the duo on stage to do the same; At one point, North, Kanye’s daughter, emerged along with several of her friends to jump into “Talking,” a song from “Vultures” in which she appears.
Fans climb a structure to watch Kanye West perform Thursday at Rolling Loud.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
After everyone left the stage, an unseen DJ played old Kanye classics, including “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1,” “All of the Lights,” and “Runaway,” for about half an hour, while a fog machine did everything. everything possible to hide the fact that the rapper would not return. (“Vultures 1” has some highlights, but listening to those amazing old tracks really made it clear how dramatically Ye’s musical abilities have declined in recent years.)
Did the fans care? Salty tweets proliferated among people apparently watching online (the general idea was that Kanye had committed a scam), although those on the ground certainly didn’t seem bothered: new songs like “Paid,” “Back to Me,” and “Keys to My Life” inspired huge reactions among the crowd of tens of thousands, even among a group of people who had broken through a security fence to climb a section of stage scaffolding. During the chorus of “Carnival,” the stage music cut out and the audience took over the song’s percussive vocal singing, drowning the performers in the spotlight.
But of course, that wasn’t difficult to do.