Mr. West! Mr. West!
So I went to the Kanye West show that MTV Canada put on last week. The good folks at MTV were nice enough to give me a ticket - it was a small show - five hundred people, maybe a few more - at the Masonic Temple here in Toronto. They taped the whole thing for a future broadcast, but I have to admit that I wasn't so sure that the whole thing was going to be any good. You know, getting the big star to come in for a launch party, I expected a few songs and a quick exit.
I was a whole new level of wrong. KW brought it for close to two hours, and what was so amazing about the whole thing was that there was almost nothing in the audience to feed off of. He had a tiny audience, many of whom were unfamiliar with any song that didn't have "Gold Digger" in the title.
Still, song after song. There were a few hiccups, and a few false starts. But for the most part, I was watching someone who is better at his job than most of us will ever be at ours.
Best part of the whole evening was something that I had heard was happening at other shows. He played "Gold Digger," introducing the song as something for "all those people who haven't bought the albums." Nothing if not self-aware, our Kanye. When it came to the chorus, though - you know the part of the song where "Gold Digger" is rhymed with "broke n-word" he played the clean version, where he just says "broke, broke" instead of anything more inflammatory. At the end of the song, though, he turned to the audience - remember, this is 500 white people who are all somehow connected to MTV (hardly the most diverse crowd ever) - and says, "All you white people in the audience, this is your only chance to say (bad n-word that I really don't want to write). go ahead and say it, but this is your only chance. Don't want to hear you saying this when you leave the concert and telling people Kanye West said it was okay."
He then went on to do the "unclean" version, with 500 mostly-white Canadians singing along and gleefully yelling out a word that normally none of us would even whisper. It was strange and amazing and quite incredible. It would have been better had the audience been more mixed – I think there is a sort of immersive point he is making about integration that gets lost if the audience isn't a little less homogeneous – but if nothing else, it was a lesson in the way that a crowd of people will do things that an individual never would. Or in the way that we will all do anything for Kanye West.
I was a whole new level of wrong. KW brought it for close to two hours, and what was so amazing about the whole thing was that there was almost nothing in the audience to feed off of. He had a tiny audience, many of whom were unfamiliar with any song that didn't have "Gold Digger" in the title.
Still, song after song. There were a few hiccups, and a few false starts. But for the most part, I was watching someone who is better at his job than most of us will ever be at ours.
Best part of the whole evening was something that I had heard was happening at other shows. He played "Gold Digger," introducing the song as something for "all those people who haven't bought the albums." Nothing if not self-aware, our Kanye. When it came to the chorus, though - you know the part of the song where "Gold Digger" is rhymed with "broke n-word" he played the clean version, where he just says "broke, broke" instead of anything more inflammatory. At the end of the song, though, he turned to the audience - remember, this is 500 white people who are all somehow connected to MTV (hardly the most diverse crowd ever) - and says, "All you white people in the audience, this is your only chance to say (bad n-word that I really don't want to write). go ahead and say it, but this is your only chance. Don't want to hear you saying this when you leave the concert and telling people Kanye West said it was okay."
He then went on to do the "unclean" version, with 500 mostly-white Canadians singing along and gleefully yelling out a word that normally none of us would even whisper. It was strange and amazing and quite incredible. It would have been better had the audience been more mixed – I think there is a sort of immersive point he is making about integration that gets lost if the audience isn't a little less homogeneous – but if nothing else, it was a lesson in the way that a crowd of people will do things that an individual never would. Or in the way that we will all do anything for Kanye West.
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