Not long into Kanye West's Saint Pablo Tour stop Sunday night in Columbus, after his floating stage had made its first complete pass across the Value City Arena floor, he launched into "Famous" -- the one with the video depicting naked celebrities in bed together, yes, but also the one with the Taylor Swift lyric. Upon rapping that line -- "For all my South Side niggas that know me best/ I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? I made that bitch famous" -- he abruptly paused the song and addressed his audience for the first time.
"I went through a lot to make this record," he said, likely alluding to a lengthy backstory of friendly negotiations and threatened legal clashes with Swift. "You can say whatever you want. They can't control the artists' opinion no more!" He then urged everyone in the crowd to shout that notorious lyric with all their might if they agreed with him, a charge the room complied with heartily when the time came.
It was the closest West came to directly addressing Swift all night, yet in a larger sense his whole stage show felt like a rebuke in America's sweetheart's general direction courtesy of "the abomination of Obama's nation." In stark contrast to Swift's 1989 Tour, there were no costume changes, no supporting cast, and no rehearsed stage banter. There wasn't even a proper stage, just a platform suspended in midair, leaving extra room on the floor for a mass of hypebeasts constantly in flux between dance party, mosh pit, and reverent observation.
Like West's music of late and especially the apparel he insists on designing, the setup was lavishly expensive yet spartan, both rendering Saint Pablo a one-man show and showing how much that man can do with a lot of money and skilled craftsmen at his bidding. It also ensured there would be none of the "please welcome to the stage" guest-star antics that became Swift's calling card last summer -- because even if Chance The Rapper had wanted to return the favor of West guesting at his Magical Coloring Day extravaganza by trekking to Columbus for an "Ultralight Beam" nightcap, there was no practical way to get the guy on stage.
Oh God, more Kanye vs. Taylor, I know, but it's a narrative West is apparently happy to be included in and one that leapt out at me during Sunday's show. As author Steven Hyden put it in his music rivalries book Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me, "Taylor is the center of pop, and Kanye is the pop outlaw -- that's the dynamic that was established for the first time at the 2009 VMAs... this symbolic connection will probably never be broken as long as either one of them still matters."
The "Famous" fiasco obviously reignited this comparison, but the Saint Pablo Tour may be its apotheosis, the truest crystallization of West's rule-breaking ethos. It's not quite right to say Swift represents commerce and West represents art because anybody selling self-branded merch at these prices knows a thing or two about capitalism. But we've come to know Swift as an avatar for playing by the rules: of the major-label songwriting machine, of corporate America, of polite society. She's a master of working within the system. Whereas West is willing to transgress just about any standard in service of authentic expression, and in the process he has altered the course of creative history several times over.
His dedication to creating transcendent capital-A Art has given us lots of beautiful music and ugly clothing, and maybe someday it will lead to otherworldly water bottle design. But his most ambitious creative visions have manifested in his events -- particularly his concert tours, but also his TV performances and fashion shows. His tours in support of Graduation, Watch The Throne, and Yeezus grew progressively more ostentatious and awe-inspiring, successfully delivering some of the most iconic images in recent music history. What pop culture observer doesn't remember West and Jay Z perched atop giant glowing cubes, or eerie druids and a blinged-out Margiela mask marching around a mountain? Now add to that list this levitated pulpit and a spaceship-like lighting rig worthy of the Ridley Scott movies that inspired it.
What West has accomplished with this Saint Pablo set design belongs in another echelon entirely, though. It's the rare concert production that feels like an actual work of art, a creative statement as intuitive as it is awe-inspiring -- and one that, once the rush of feelings finally fades away, really makes you think. Many major tours in recent years have included segments that bring the performer to the back of the arena for a few songs, and some, including Swift's, have sent their stars soaring around the room for a song or two. Saint Pablo is democratized to a different level. With West raised high above the ground and continually circulating the arena, the experiential gap between the cheap and expensive seats narrowed significantly.
It was a show for the people, then, but certainly not about the people. One thing West and Swift do have in common is the gargantuan cult of personality surrounding them; this was a physical manifestation of that phenomenon. Middle America packed in to see West, but not the gawkers and haters he alludes to on "Black Skinhead." These were partisans all, citizens of the personal kingdom he presides over. As such, Saint Pablo's magic carpet ride felt like a powerful metaphor for his Twitter account: There he was drifting above the masses, doling out jams and occasional pearls of wisdom as the devoted throng below angled for Snapchat video. The kids on the floor followed him back and forth en masse, a literal wave of humanity to match the symbolic ripples West has long been sending through culture. It was Yeezus as Moses, or this tweet multiplied by 6,000.
https://twitter.com/kashanacauley/status/780736524325445632
