KANYE WEST at Air Canada Centre, Sunday, December 22. Rating: NNNN
Ugliness is hard to come by in American pop. Artists who are unafraid to display nastier emotions in lyrics or appear less-than glamorous are regarded suspiciously as unconfident when, in fact, the opposite is usually true.
Kanye West’s intentionally abrasive and flummoxing Yeezus album could be a manual for turning insecurity into self-mythology. Like the tour that shares its name, it is a grand paean to emotional baggage.
“I want you to know the things I’ve been failing at,” the Chicago rapper explained during an extended Auto-tuned monologue set to twinkling piano accompaniment during the first show in a two-night stand at the Air Canada Centre on Sunday night. “If I say something that’s completely stupid as fuck, it don’t matter. Don’t apply that to yo life!”
Standing in an oversized trench, wearing bejeweled Martin Margiela face mask, in front of a cracked-open mountain and a circular LED screen displaying a churning thunderstorm, West sounded more like Cassandra than Zeus when he addressed the crowd directly.
“Watch how it all goes down,” he said of his recent spate of headline-grabbing interviews. “Ten years from now you’ll be like, ‘that was inspirational!'”
West’s first solo tour in five years was a two-and-a-half-hour religious sci-fi saga that melded the earnestness of The Ten Commandments with the resplendent garishness of Zardoz. It was heavy on bass, tableau and flesh-coloured fabric. The centrepiece was a giant, snow-capped mountain that – like the troupe of faceless female dancers, the hairy beast with glowing red eyes and Jesus Christ who appear at various points – likely represents something looming large within West’s psyche.
The show opened with a trio of Yeezus’ most abrasive and incendiary songs, On Sight, New Slaves and Send It Up, that set a hard-edged, caustic tone for the first third of the show. From there he launched into a series of his recent hip-hop hits, including Mercy, Clique and Cold, that showcased how his austere minimalism in the studio of late could sound as impactful in an arena as the string sections he brought on previous outings.
As a red-eyed monster perched atop the mountain, West splayed himself on a rising hydraulic cliff jutting out into the centre of the venue. A single spotlight illuminated falling fake snow as he belted Coldest Winter, a pop ballad about the untimely death of his mother from his 2008 album 808s & Heartbreak.
The sequence illustrated how deftly West and his collaborators use lights and silhouette to create simple, dramatic moments on stage. The exploding mountain gets all the attention, but the Yeezus tour is a series of tableaus artfully conceived for the Instagram age. Essentially, Yeezus will do everything in his powers to make your shitty phone camera shots look as stylish as possible.
Coldest Winter ushered in a solemn segment of the show that featured his most self-critical and misanthropic material – Hold My Liquor, I’m In It and Blood On Leaves – as well as a symmetrical orgy routine that would not look out of place in a Peaches production.
Up until the end, West’s face remained covered in a series of designer masks that denied the audience a glimpse of the emotion in his face as he sang and rapped. It wasn’t until after the heavy material was out of the way that the crowd was allowed to see and connect with his grinning face during the string of feel-good fan favourites, such as Good Life and Flashing Lights, that rounded out the set.
One wonders if aesthetics have become a convenient crutch to mask the intensity of these songs. Then again, West delights in making his listeners work harder and the conviction in his voice – as always – was unwavering.
