As I weave my way around throngs of excited fans on the way to my seat at SoFi Stadium, all I can think about is my friend who recently asked what I was doing for Passover, and how I didn’t have the heart to tell her how I’d be spending its first night. Even being here strictly on assignment, there’s a patina of guilt around even mentioning Kanye that’s become impossible to scrub off. I’m not just talking about the obvious ethical qualifiers surrounding the whole thing, but the sheer irrelevance of it all. The release of Bully has been a total non-event—even the diehard Donda defenders I know have completely checked out despite Ye’s gestures toward rehabilitating his reputation. Outside the core Yeezy army who’s swarmed its release, he’s never felt farther from the center of attention than he does in this moment.
But you wouldn’t know it from the fans in the building—70,000 of them in total, and that’s just the first of two sold-out nights here in L.A. As they swirl around wearing recently purchased Bully shirts adorned with boilerplate designs of stars and luchador masks, you’d think he was still the sun that gave the planets their orbit. Even amid this buzz, however, the cracks are starting to show. While driving in, I turned my radio dial only to hear his new track “All the Love” thrumming along on its “Black Skinhead”-backwash thump, rendered tiresome after 13 straight years of commercial syncs rinsing the latter track to death. When it ends, one of the Power 106 DJs asks the other one how he likes the album. After an awkward pause, he struggles to enthuse any more than gently suggesting a good album is buried in there somewhere.
If there is, we certainly didn’t hear it tonight. Announcing this concert after spending the last couple years performing random one-off shows around the world like an embattled Lydia Tár, Ye’s return marked his first real U.S. show in five years (assuming you don’t count when he stood around with Ty Dolla $ign in a hockey mask for his “headlining set” at Rolling Loud 2024). As I took my seat, the stage appeared to be some kind of half-domed orb surrounded by a tall curtain that formed a wall around it. Thick haze already poured from its surface. Ye has previously played setups that have similarly made him appear as if he were walking on the moon, but nothing so literally spherical as this; you wondered how he was going to keep from tumbling off the edge. When the curtain finally dropped, and the stage lit up like a spinning globe, he emerged from its center with a harness fastening him to the top: a tether to keep him from drifting away completely.
Though he’s lost a great many things, Ye still has an undeniable touch for this kind of production spectacle. But these people didn’t just come to see a stage; a set is only as good as the actors foregrounding it, and as Ye launched into the opening stretch of songs from Bully, he instantly stumbled. Barely making it half a line into “King” before dropping out and largely letting the instrumental play on its own, he continued to miss long stretches of lines in these opening songs. By the time he finished “Father,” he took a very long, very silent break, before getting irritable at the tech team and demanding that they “make the earth move slower.” After adjusting the globe visuals a couple times (causing the Earth to jitter around in the process), he was finally satisfied enough to launch into “Gas Chambers,” I mean, “All the Love.”
These four Yeezus-y opening songs from Bully were the only part of the album we’d hear that night, as from there West delved into one of his oldies runs. On paper, he played just about everything you’d want: “On Sight,” “Jesus Walks,” “Blood on the Leaves,” “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”; but through them all, there’s something amiss. The crowd is hardly moving. Ye is hardly moving. There’s a vibrational deficit draining the room that even the opening drop of “Good Life” can’t completely fix (though it didn’t help that he forced his team to restart the song about four times because he didn’t like the lights).
Do not let the unmistakably Jewish name in the byline above fool you; this is my fourth time seeing Kanye West, who now goes by Ye. I was at the Larry Hoover show in 2021, and even at that late stage, the difference in energy between then and what I’m witnessing now is palpable. At both of these shows, he played “Say You Will,” except where at that set he busted out moves through an entire six-minute slow jam, here he merely bobbed around listlessly, letting the backing track do all the heavy lifting (along with some adornment from André Troutman, whose talkbox continually made an appearance to give a fresher coat to his older, more Auto-Tuney songs).
Where before, his constant mid-show stops and restarts carried the buzziness of an excited kid conducting a perfectly messy party, here they feel more disgruntled, sapping the momentum out of his songs rather than re-jolting them. This reaches a particular low toward the end as, inexplicably, he launches into the same opening Bully stretch yet again, as if in an attempt to actually rap them in earnest this time. By this point, people had fully stopped cheering the beginnings of each song and began sitting down, particularly after the long pause that once again came after “Father.” After disappearing into the stage for a few minutes, I think to myself, surely he won’t follow this intermission by doing “All the Love” again. He does, of course (none of the people around me bother to stand up).
And so it goes, running through old favorites like “Through the Wire” (mixed so messily the crowd doesn’t even recognize it at first), until finally ending on an unceremonious version of “Runaway,” before disappearing back into the orb and being whisked away.
Historically, one way or another, Ye has managed to power through his many controversies to deliver something unpredictable at his concerts. But besides a few appearances from Don Toliver and his daughter North, there was an overwhelming safety and procedure to the evening that, more than anything, just made me feel old. For those who can still stomach him, Ye is the epitome of a guilty pleasure, but I keep questioning what the nature of that pleasure even is anymore. The first time I heard all these songs, they sounded so unbelievably fresh and new. These days, even the most “futuristic” sounding albums of his golden run sound pretty distinctly of their time, and the backpacker classics are from an even more bygone generation. Enjoying Ye has gone from defending a great, boundary-pushing pop artist who occasionally says unfortunate things to essentially defending one’s right just to feel nostalgia for him.
Though signing to Larry Jackson’s media company Gamma has given the impression of a more professional return to form, the Bully era so far has mostly consisted of Kanye rushing through apologies, then asking fans to spend hundreds of dollars to come worship him. Bully’s vague references to “the new me,” hilariously unspecific allusions to “political and social issues,” and almost-threats that “it still could’ve been worse” are impossible to see as any kind of meaningful redemption, though I’m not trying to advocate against empathy. Clearly this man is a victim of serious mental illness, and any steps he makes toward getting better should be encouraged. So why is he rushing back onto the stage like this? Did we really need an album from him this soon after “Heil Hitler”?
Ye is still currently going through multiple lawsuits for admitted sexual assault and abuse of his employees, and is inspiring new waves of boundary-pushing, generationally beloved abusers in his wake. It’s become impossible to know where he’s truly at these days, though when he performed “Carnival” during the concert, he notably left in the line “Now I’m Ye Kelly bitch/Now I’m Bill Cosby, bitch/Now I’m Puff Daddy rich/That’s Me Too me rich.” Clearly there are still people willing to ignore it all to come out for Kanye, but you have to wonder if all the handwringing is really worth it for something this numbingly missable.
SETLLIST:
KING
THIS A MUST
FATHER
ALL THE LOVE
Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1
Can’t Tell Me Nothing
Niggas in Paris (Kanye and JAY-Z song)
Mercy
Praise God
Black Skinhead
On Sight
Blood on the Leaves
CARNIVAL (¥$ song)
Power
Bound 2
Say You Will
Heartless
Moon
E85 (Don Toliver cover)
KING
THIS A MUST
FATHER
ALL THE LOVE
TALKING (¥$ song)
PIERCING ON MY HAND (North West cover)
EVERYBODY
All Falls Down
Jesus Walks
Through the Wire
Good Life
All of the Lights
Runaway