Stadium Status
How do I love ye? Let me count the ways. My pilgrimage to Kanye West’s concert in Madrid struck a chord. But it was one solitary E key suspended in silence that resonated the most.
Some dreams require a passport and mine began with an overnight flight from New York’s JFK airport. Within hours I woke up on a different continent and soon found myself walking towards a massive stadium with tens of thousands of other people tuned to the same frequency.
Kanye West’s world tour hasn’t had a marketing campaign that you’d expect from a performer of his magnitude yet the G.O.O.D. news spread to his followers around the globe. Spectacular clips of the production spread across social media, and for those already listening no media plugs were necessary.
Ye Live in Madrid was an elemental living work of art. The production operated on an almost unimaginable scale: the visuals, sound systems, light/shadow projections, fog machines, and fireworks were of epic proportions.
Every progression amplified the music; as the sky grew darker the stage grew brighter.
I witnessed the striking image of a solitary figure on top of the world, commanding an audience large enough to populate a small city with nothing but melodies and a microphone.
All the songs were crowd pleasers and thousands of voices rose in unison for them while moments of near silence carried just as much weight.
From my floor seats my jaw dropped as performed with effortless bravado. During “Jesus Walks” he strode through fire as the crowd erupted, declaring with blasé, “I’ve got a hundred of these”.
Entertainment and ideas are America’s greatest export and in this way Kanye West is a storyteller, trailblazer and titan of industry.
He shaped the cultural zeitgeist of the 2000s: auto tuning vocals, wearing Yeezys, spazzing on TV, trolling on Twitter, and ranting on SNL, to name a few.
At the same time he exposed emotional vulnerability with an authenticity of character seldom found in a modern celebrity.
My belief in his genius has never been about controversy. It’s about the mysterious trinity between the artist, the audience, and the art itself. Somewhere between those three points, meaning is created.
I remember the first time I saw Kanye. It was on a box TV in my high school cafeteria- the music video for “The New Workout Plan”. In college, I would leave the door of my dorm room open as I played 808s and Heartbreak. I still remember downloading leaked tracks from The Life of Pablo on voice memos. VOICE MEMOS! I’ve measured different seasons of my life by his albums.
My flight home went by in the blink of an eye because I had videos from the concert to watch on repeat. A week has passed and I’m still processing all of it because what I witnessed was out of this goddamn world. The moments now exist only in my camera roll and memory.
Kanye West is a man of rare achievements who has accumulated more labels than most artists could in several lifetimes: producer, rapper, songwriter, designer, entrepreneur, son, husband, father, billionaire, disruptor, believer.
There’s no way to capture a multi-prismatic person with one color.
The title he ultimately chose for himself is pure and simple: Ye. In Hebrew, the pronoun can function as “you,” and “you all” with biblical translations using it to address people collectively. The name is strangely expansive for two letters, personal and communal all at once.
ye.
Name another living artist whose entire identity and creative universe can be summoned by a single piano key. Even when the final note of Runaway fades it keeps resonating.
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