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 duo 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 performance at Rolling Loud (the hip-hop record festival, with wildly popular editions in cities like Miami, New York and Los Angeles) was advertised (or at least was widely perceived to be advertised) as something different: his first full concert. Large-scale festival performance since the apparent collapse of his career after he made a series of anti-Semitic comments in late 2022.
Fans climb a structure to watch Kanye West perform at Rolling Loud on Thursday night.
(Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Times)
However, he and Ty hosted a listening session in front of SoFi, where Rolling Loud California will perform through Sunday with acts including Nicki Minaj, Post Malone and the duo of Future and Metro Boomin. The two played (well, the sound system played) many of the songs from “Vultures 1”; After they 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 smoke machine did everything. possible to hide the fact that the rapper was not there. (“Vultures 1” has some highlights, but these amazing old tracks really made it clear how dramatically his musical abilities have declined in recent years.)
Did the fans care? Salty tweets proliferated among people apparently watching them 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” and “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” (currently the number one song on Billboard's Hot 100), the stage music cut out and the audience took over the song's percussive vocal singing, drowning out the performers in the center of attention.
But of course, that wasn't difficult to do.
