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On Sunday night, at Tyler, Camp Flog Gnaw's creator's festival, I watched the giant screen next to the main stage and saw some men. Thousands of them. Pressed against each other and compacted like sardines, only the faces are visible as they fix the scene in front of them. The festival camera was formed on the crowd as the scene resumed for the debut of Kanye West and Kid Cudi's Kids See Ghosts project, and the diet was a pretty good indicator of the demographics of the crowd. While some women had braved the absurd crush of the crowd, the audience seemed largely composed of young men, most of whom appeared to be between 25 and 25 years old. They had traveled miles and waited for hours before witnessing a religious experience: the return of Kanye West.
In the past two years – since a Californian show precipitated a mental breakdown in his life and career two years ago this week – Kanye has been more visible but less present than in his entire career. All of the streaming, TMZ interviews and drop offs masked the fact that, aside from a Cubs match here or a fashion show here, Kanye did not really get in touch with his fanbase at the same level as before. There has been no appearance at awards, few television performances and, most importantly, no public broadcast. In 2017, Kanye did not play at least one film set, festival or other.
This may seem trivial for most artists, but not for West. Kanye West's live show has always been an integral part of his art, an opportunity to explore the increasingly dense content of his records. Kanye's records almost do not work without the live broadcast. Where his albums have been a space for hedonism, nihilism and the unbridled ego, Kanye's real arena has always been closer to the church – a space in which he could breathe, forgive all the sins that he had confessed to the record and above all, bring people together. Kanye's last three major tours – Glow In The Dark, Yeezus and Saint Pablo – were all at the heart of Kanye's drama mission. They were about to find redemption in whatever form.
Over the years, he has found ways to bring the public closer to his vision of transcendence. In the beginning, this happened through masterpieces such as moons, mountains and waterfalls, but finally, during his visit of Saint-Pablo, through engineering works, a floating scene could be seen both from the background and from the ground. (Lady Gaga remembers that Kanye had told him that he would never sell a ticket for a silly seat; the scene of St. Pablo was a natural progression of that ideal.) His shows, also deeply influenced by nature Gospel community's musical aspect, were designed so that thousands of people could find each other and find what he found in his music. During Yeezus' tour, he began giving a speech at "Runaway" about the importance of being oneself, loving oneself, caring for oneself. These speeches were sometimes called fanatical, but they were more like sermons and they felt really divine at times.
For Kanye, his concerts reminded him that despite his rare celebrity status, he was still addressing the same kind of people he had grown up with – dreamers, devotees, and fans. Whenever Kanye's discs were about to disappear into a cloud of famous brands and fashionable references, the series attracted him from top to bottom. it was almost like he needed them to remember that his fans loved him for his vision and not for his immense status.
Because of this experience, I thought that Sunday night's Kids See Ghosts show could be the beginning of a new era for Kanye, an era that was removing MAGA hats this summer and revealing compelling revisionist stories . She has instead turned to the community spirit that defined her earlier work. In you and Children see ghosts, he made dark albums that would be a perfect prelude to a classic Kanye show; it would have been logical for this set to offer explanations and, perhaps, an atonement. It was, of course, incredibly naive. Instead of a redemptive counterpoint, Kanye and Cudi presented a dark and emotional synthesis of the hyper-masculine recklessness that has gone through Kanye's work over the past two years.
If there was a theme that went through both you and Children see ghostsKanye and Cudi are both looking for a kind of freedom within a society that, in their opinion, will never let them be free. For Cudi, freedom means living without the depression and addictions that tormented him during his career; for Kanye, freedom is a bit more complicated. Through his Wyoming records and the press cycle associated with them, he almost felt like he was looking for a line to cross in the public eye. Kanye has always wanted to push the boundaries of what's good and what's not, and this time it's more personal. As Kanye put it in his summer work, the free look of society comes only when you have lost all the love of society. The most eloquent words of his two Wyoming records have arrived Children see ghosts'Reborn', when he admitted that he wanted 'all the pain', 'all the smoke', 'all the blame'. For Kanye, exile comes with liberation.
True to this ideal, the show Kids See Ghosts has relied on this desperate need to forget. The setlist of the show – starting with The life of Pablo"Father stretches my hands" before going through the whole Children see ghosts, two songs from 808s, Cudi's "pursuit of happiness" and, finally, youThe "Ghost Town" is an unusually dark scene for a Kanye show and is centered on songs with blackened emaciated hearts, talking about being fucked or getting fucked. "Welcome to Heartbreak" and "Paranoid" have been the subject of rare projections and, given their origins on Kanye's most emotional record, their inclusion seems to be saying. "Pursuit of Happiness" is the only solo track performed by Cudi, which is also reminiscent of a nihilist and moody play in the series.
Rather than reusing the design of the floating stage of the Saint Pablo tour, Kanye and Cudi were suspended in a large Plexiglas box. This staging was typically on the nose – Kanye dressed in dark clothes in her glass jail, lowering her eyes to the audience; Cudi, dressed in a huge white jacket, bypasses him as a redemptive angel, but undeniably compelling to watch. Kanye and Cudi remain magnetic interpreters, even hidden and deformed by perspex sheets, despite the fact that Kanye seemed to have trouble making himself understood. Few jokes were delivered between the songs, and apparently to remedy his lack of political discussion, Kanye clarified that he and Cudi were "just
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