KANYE WEST at Air Canada Centre, Tuesday, August 30. Rating: NNNN
Many concerts live or die on crowd participation. This is especially true at hip-hop shows where the set-up is often little more than an MC, a microphone and a DJ, and the connection between audience and artist can create an energy equal to a band with a truckload of instruments.
Kanye West’s Saint Pablo tour involved a lot more than an MC, a microphone and a DJ, but in contrast to the Chicago rapper’s grandly theatrical outing in support of 2013’s Yeezus album, his latest tour succeeded on simpler gestures.
His Saint Pablo tour is based on that moment in an arena show when the star mounts some sort of moving contraption – for Justin Bieber it was an elevated trampoline, for Katy Perry it was a cotton-candy cloud – and ventures forth to get closer to the people. This show was essentially that moment extended into two hours.
The first of West’s two shows in Toronto this week began with West tethering himself to a floating platform that looked to be about 20-square feet in size. As the rootsy gospel sample from Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1 played out, the platform lifted into the air and spotlights embedded in its sides obscured views of West, who remained in darkness while lights underneath illuminated the crowd on the floor below.
The beat dropped and fans clamoured to get under West and pogo along. Not only was it immediately clear the crowd’s energy would be essential to the success of Saint Pablo, but that the fan-artist dynamic was the spectacle.
He rewound the song and played it again, giving the audience a chance to rap along even louder to its opening lines about a model with a bleached asshole. The lights switched on, appropriately, during Famous and a mosh pit went into overdrive during the song’s outro sample of Sister Nancy’s reggae staple Bam Bam.
A string of bangers – including Mercy, I Don’t Like and Pop Style – kept the pit pumped as the lighting design cycled through hues of yellow, orange and deep red.
While many rappers are quick to goad an audience into throwing arms in the air the moment the energy wavers, West is more of an executive decision-type. His back-to-basics set-up allowed him to be responsive to the crowd. Throughout the set, he frequently instructed the band to adjust this or that and replayed big sing-a-longs such as Runaway to stoke the vibe.
When the downtempo Arthur Russell-sampling 30 Hours fell flat, he cut it short. “They’re not feeling this one,” he said. (Instead he played Father Stretch My Hands Part 1 again – and the audience gleefully rapped about anal bleaching for a third time.)
For a brief moment, the mass of sprawling humanity taking in the views from the pit also included West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, who slipped in unnoticed, but caused a minor sensation as she waded back to the sidelines surrounded by security.
West’s players – long-time producer Mike Dean, singer Tony Williams and singer/composer Caroline Shaw – remained unseen, but were felt through the beautiful sound mix. The bass drops were big, satisfying and distortion-free and West’s singing and rapping sounded clear and full of fire.
Shaw, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for her a cappella piece Partita for 8 Voices, incorporates speech patterns such as murmuring and whisper to create an unusual range of timbres. She added a haunting but warm dimension to Only One, a lullaby-esque ballad in which West becomes a vessel for his late mother to speak to her granddaughter.
It was an affecting moment, and Shaw’s eerie choral lines nicely bridged the themes of retro sci-fi wonderment and extravagant religiosity that have been present in West’s arena tours for the past eight years.
Those themes were apparent in the heavenly and hellish lighting schemes and when West posed on his platform above the gathered masses like Moses parting the Red Sea. At other times, he knelt as if in reverence to them and during Jesus Walks he dramatically stretched one arm toward fans as if in a renaissance painting.
West’s The Life Of Pablo is probably his most religious album. It is heavy on gospel oratories and choirs that soundtrack a classic a redemption narrative while mainlining listeners into the sex, drugs, mania and nerves that are apparently part-and-parcel with making it big in America. It dares you to enjoy even the darkest parts of his psyche.
By contrast, this tour was much lighter it moved in quick succession between fraught Pablo cuts such as Freestyle 4 and FML and uplifting hits such as All Falls Down, Good Life and All Of The Lights. It was as much about levity as it was levitation and somehow felt more straight-up hip-hop than his past few outings.
Of course it wasn’t all levity. This was a Kanye West concert. In a final dramatic gesture, he knelt on his platform as it inched toward a single beam of light – the sun reflecting off God’s eternally bleached asshole? – and the screens showed his shadow approaching a cosmic divide between blue and black. An extended version of gospel song Ultralight Beam played as he crossed the threshold and presumably rejoined the rest of us back on earth.
kevinr@nowtoronto.com | @kevinritchie
