No matter Kanye West was paid to headline the primary night time of this weekend’s Rolling Loud California pageant, it was simple cash. Onstage for about an hour Thursday night with Ty Dolla Signal — his associate on the chart-topping “Vultures 1” album launched final month beneath the duo identify ¥$ — Kanye roamed round in a black jacket and a face masks as their songs performed over the pageant’s sound system on an enormous round stage planted within the parking zone of Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.
If he was rapping, you couldn’t hear it; if he was holding a microphone, you couldn’t see it.
This type of presentation isn’t new for the controversial rapper now referred to as Ye, who’s launched his final a number of albums with high-profile listening occasions held in arenas and stadiums across the nation. However Kanye’s reserving at Rolling Loud — hip-hop’s pageant of file, with wildly common editions in cities together with Miami, New York and Los Angeles — was billed (or no less than was extensively perceived to be billed) as one thing totally different: his first full-scale pageant efficiency for the reason that seeming meltdown of his career after he made a collection of antisemetic remarks in late 2022.
But a listening session is what he and Ty delivered in entrance of SoFi, the place Rolling Loud California is about to run by means of Sunday with acts together with Nicki Minaj, Submit Malone and the duo of Future and Metro Boomin. The 2 of them performed — properly, the sound system performed — most of the songs from “Vultures 1”; after they left the stage, an unseen DJ performed a couple of half-hour’s price of previous Kanye classics, together with “Father Stretch My Palms Pt. 1,” “The entire Lights” and “Runaway,” as a smoke machine did its greatest to hide the truth that the rapper wasn’t there. (“Vultures 1” has some excessive factors, however these staggering oldies actually made clear how dramatically his musical expertise have diminished in recent times.)
Did followers thoughts? Salty tweets proliferated amongst of us apparently watching on-line — the overall thought was that Kanye had pulled off a swindle — although these on the bottom definitely appeared unbothered: New songs like “Paid” and “Again to Me” and “Keys to My Life” impressed big reactions within the crowd of tens of hundreds, together with amongst one group of people that’d damaged by means of a safety fence to climb onto a bit of stage scaffolding. Through the refrain of “Carnival” — at the moment the No. 1 monitor on Billboard’s Sizzling 100 — the music from the stage minimize out and the viewers took over the track’s percussive vocal chant, drowning out the performers within the highlight.
However then in fact that wasn’t laborious to do.
This story initially appeared in Los Angeles Times.
