We know everything now. You can take the blue pill in whatever form you like -- Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, whichever particularly moves your thumbs -- and go down the rabbit hole to sort out all the minute details. But there were certain things you had to be at Madison Square Garden for Yeezy Season 3 to see and experience. The one thing that caught my attention most -- which people were probably least concerned with at the event as well as online -- was this: Kanye West was exhausted. When my eyes saw his, either in real life or magnified on the Jumbotron, I saw bags underneath them big enough to hold the stress, anguish, and nervousness of a man that over-ambitiously stretched himself way too thin. I have no idea what Pablo's life is like after hearing the album, but I felt the scattered energy Kanye has expended in his own life over the last month or so planning a fashion-innovating, album-debuting, video-game-teaser-unveiling, socialite-pleasing, squad-celebrating event of magnanimously overblown proportions. So when he said, "This shit was hard to do man," and I saw his eyes and heard the fatigue in his voice underneath the arrogance, I believed him.
Belief isn't sympathy though. The most I can muster is empathy. Kanye will seemingly cook up anything to feed the hypebeasts. When you affix your name to the son of God, bestow your own music with the title of album of the life, and take ownership of people's children (and we're not talking claiming dependents on taxes), you are hoisting yourself into the flames as well. Kanye feeds his own hype machine as much as his stans and haters do, and though his egocentric motivations are repulsive almost all the time, dude actually cares about everything he does and puts the work in to prove it. He is petty enough to see his wife's initials as two of 32 characters in a tweet and e-annihilate the author. There was definitely history and ego tied up in that quick beef with Wiz Khalifa, but ego is a major foundation for everything Kanye builds. So it is not far-fetched to assume he actually cares what people think about him, including even his most ride-or-die fans that would gladly wear threads made of shit if he cut them skinny and sewed them with holes.
I felt how much he cares, how many times his attention has been spliced, and what that did to his well-being as a human while I sat in my seat. All of that manifested itself in the show. The tug-of-war between fashion and music on MSG's floor alone made me feel like my limbs were tied to two horses with carrots dangling in front of their faces ready to rip me in half at the slightest hunger pang. Throw in family and friends, a video game, the expectations of critics (aka "no-pussy-getting bloggers"), stans, haters, and the egomaniacal ambition to impress them all at the same time, and lesser men would break.
https://twitter.com/kanyewest/status/697220614105468929
Throw in the Only One video game, the Kardashians rolling in like royalty decked out in fur coats, Anna Wintour palling it up with Kim, random celebrities like Rosie O'Donnell, and the new tracks Young Thug and Vic Mensa had Kanye play after the album premiere was over, and it was a hot mess. Most of the crowd were millennials, and many of them were on their phones making sure people knew they were there. They would do that if there was only one thing going on, so they had no chance against four or five attractions. It makes me wonder which creative process Wiz actually detracted from.
Y'all look what they selling at Kanye show pic.twitter.com/XqmO6GFKMc
— Charles (@Boom_likean808) February 11, 2016
The album is called The Life Of Pablo, but what the audience got yesterday was an immersion in the life of Kanye. No detail was too small for him to attend to or oversee leading up to this event -- from "sewers" to the merch display to the guest list. Applying that type of focus to just one thing is draining, but to spread it across multiple things is madness. Kanye has his faults and stretches of being unbearable, but seeing what I saw and hearing the absolutely incredible music I heard in spite of the whole spectacle, makes me more aware than ever that respect matters to the guy, and I respect him all the more for that.
