Though he’s lost a great many things, Ye still has an undeniable touch for this kind of production spectacle. But these people didn’t just come to see a stage; a set is only as good as the actors foregrounding it, and as Ye launched into the opening stretch of songs from Bully, he instantly stumbled. Barely making it half a line into “King” before dropping out and largely letting the instrumental play on its own, he continued to miss long stretches of lines in these opening songs. By the time he finished “Father,” he took a very long, very silent break, before getting irritable at the tech team and demanding that they “make the earth move slower.” After adjusting the globe visuals a couple times (causing the Earth to jitter around in the process), he was finally satisfied enough to launch into “Gas Chambers,” I mean, “All the Love.”
These four Yeezus-y opening songs from Bully were the only part of the album we’d hear that night, as from there West delved into one of his oldies runs. On paper, he played just about everything you’d want: “On Sight,” “Jesus Walks,” “Blood on the Leaves,” “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”; but through them all, there’s something amiss. The crowd is hardly moving. Ye is hardly moving. There’s a vibrational deficit draining the room that even the opening drop of “Good Life” can’t completely fix (though it didn’t help that he forced his team to restart the song about four times because he didn’t like the lights).
Do not let the unmistakably Jewish name in the byline above fool you; this is my fourth time seeing Kanye West, who now goes by Ye. I was at the Larry Hoover show in 2021, and even at that late stage, the difference in energy between then and what I’m witnessing now is palpable. At both of these shows, he played “Say You Will,” except where at that set he busted out moves through an entire six-minute slow jam, here he merely bobbed around listlessly, letting the backing track do all the heavy lifting (along with some adornment from André Troutman, whose talkbox continually made an appearance to give a fresher coat to his older, more Auto-Tuney songs).
Whereas before, his constant mid-show stops and restarts carried the buzz of an excited kid conducting a perfectly messy party, here they feel more disgruntled, sapping the momentum from his songs rather than re-jolting them. This reaches a particular low toward the end as, inexplicably, he launches into the same opening Bully stretch yet again, as if in an attempt to actually rap them in earnest this time. By this point, people had fully stopped cheering the beginnings of each song and began sitting down, particularly after the long pause that once again came after “Father.” After disappearing into the stage for a few minutes, I think to myself, surely he won’t follow this intermission by doing “All the Love” again. He does, of course (none of the people around me bother to stand up).
