Kanye West has always had a complicated relationship with religion. From early gospel-tinged songs like “Jesus Walks” and “Never Let Me Down” to 2013’s industrial ego trip “I Am A God (feat. God),” Kanye has struggled with the role of god in his music. Yet, his most recent album “The Life of Pablo” is his fullest exploration of faith and divinity and reveals the most about Kanye’s theology. While other religiously influenced rappers like Chance the Rapper and Kendrick Lamar treat their gods as saviors, lifting them up to better places, Kanye’s god is a different sort of figure. Kanye’s god might just be Kanye.
When Kanye came through the Bay Area this October for the Saint Pablo Tour, playing two shows at the Oracle Arena on Oct. 22 and 23, that theology was on full display. To the adoring fans in the arena — especially the ones directly below his stage, which floated above the venue’s floor — Kanye was nothing less than a cult leader, gathering his faithful in a beautiful worship of the self.
Throughout the evening, Kanye had complete control of the audience. He would start songs over repeatedly until the crowd sang along with the gusto he desired, mix parts of songs together in entirely new formulations and go on rambling, seemingly improvised speeches at will. At any other show, these would be reasons for discontent in the audience. Yet with Kanye, these “bugs” became features — you go to a Kanye show, at least in part, for the things you can’t predict.
Take, for example, Kanye’s performance of “Runaway.” “Runaway,” the climax of his 2010 album “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” is already one of the more revelatory songs in his catalog, a nine-minute-long piece where Kanye lays bare many of his internal conflicts. On Saturday night, though, Kanye took the song even further, free-associating about the nature of genius and insanity for nearly 10 more minutes. He started his monologue on a defensive tone, attacking those who would call him crazy and instead calling himself a “Fucking Genius.” Yet he moved beyond himself as he went on, dealing with racism, the media and all the other forces holding down creative minds in America, casting himself as a Christ-like figure who would “take the pain, on behalf of all believers, all dreamers, all thinkers.”
Even beyond the rants, though, Kanye’s live show was something special. The stage set, consisting solely of a faux-industrial platform suspended above the arena floor, was brilliant in its simplicity. It solved the key economic problem of massive stadium shows — the need to maximize both stage space and floor seating — in an inventive way. Yet Kanye didn’t simply use the setup to increase his profit margin, though he did admit that that was a major concern during his monologue. To Kanye, the stage platform was a creative tool — one he could leverage to further his command of the audience. As the stage and its lights moved across the floor, it seemed to drive the people in the floor seats into a frenzy, each of them striving to dance under his beams of light.
I’ve mostly refrained from talking about the music because, well, there isn’t much to talk about. It’s Kanye West, perhaps the most critically acclaimed rapper of all time, performing the best of his 13-year repertoire. While the setlist was more heavily weighted towards “Yeezus” and especially “The Life of Pablo,” his two most recent albums, he played a mix of selections, ranging from “Jesus Walks” from his first album to his guest appearances from this summer on Drake’s “Pop Style” and Schoolboy Q’s “THat Part.” Overall, his performance was energetic, sometimes deviating from the studio recordings but never veering into incompetence or incoherence.
Ultimately, it was those points of deviation that made the most impact on the congregants of the Church of Kanye West. The songs affected most by his changes were “Famous, ”“Runaway,” “Only One” and “Waves.” Each song is already a standout track in Kanye’s catalog, but their power was only magnified by how he made them feel like living, fluid creations in his performances, and the audience felt that. As Kanye sang and talked through the 20-minute rendition of “Runaway,” the man standing next to me told me that he was definitely buying floor seats to the next show.
Contact Jacob Kuppermann at jkupperm ‘at’ stanford.edu.