There are a few moments in my life as a fan of live music that stick out. The ones that have bewildered me the most were moments when an artist performed in a way so that their music and their personal character were inseparable, at once combating and embracing in a rhythmic symbiosis that only the performance of great music could allow. And each time I left feeling like the artist I loved was someone larger than life, ruled by their own sense of self-worth, yet electric in their charisma and brilliant in their art.
The first such memory I have of this feeling was when I saw Bob Dylan in concert. Or rather, I saw the back of Bob Dylan’s head in concert. I had listened to Dylan’s music before, mostly because he is one of those undisputed masters I had read about in Rolling Stone Magazine and because my dad seemed to have a fascination with him. In short, I listened to Bob Dylan because I felt like I had to.
But it came as a blow to my psyche when that man, THE Bob Dylan, positioned himself on stage so that his back was totally turned to my side of the audience. I didn’t see his face once. To me, this was an outrage, an affront to the very essence of what it meant to perform. Yet my father couldn’t help but snicker at such antics, and it didn’t help me feel any less cheated when all he could say was “That’s Bob Dylan for you.” It took years for me to forgive Dylan, but it took minutes for me after the concert to realize I had just seen a performance dominated as much by a genius’ personality as it was by his music.
Bob Dylan’s illusive, frustrating antics, the sense that he will always have the ‘last laugh’ in any situation both musical and personal, are perhaps what I love about him the most. So who could have possibly topped Bob Dylan’s show of personal self-assurance, live in-concert? Whose one-of-a-kind charisma could have had even more of a grip on every part of a performance?
Kanye West.
Kanye’s live performance is still something I talk about anytime I talk about concerts. The immense volcano-prop, what I call “Mount Vesuv-Yeezus,” that was the center of his performance, the now infamous rant in which he asked, “What do you have to do to prove that you’re creative,” the 35-song set list. It was all so much. And it was all so Kanye. And for that crazy, interactive and altogether awe inspiring three hours, I felt like I got it. Whatever he was trying to prove or show to me as a fan, I got it.
So it pains me to recognize that Kanye is perhaps the most hated musical personality of our generation. And I can’t blame people for hating Kanye, the man, at times. Yet it would be a shame for Kanye the man to overshadow Kanye the musician, the creator.
Sure, his personality is as much a part of his shows as his music is, as I readily mentioned above. But when that personality has created art in the past, great and paradigm-shifting music has always seemed to come about.
Bob Dylan is perhaps most revered in today’s musical world because of his uncompromising commitment to his songs, as he has always attempted to make his songs and delivery of those songs stand alone, even as they have (against his will) come to define his personality.
T.S. Eliot once asserted what he felt great artists needed to make their art truly great, saying “The poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop his consciousness throughout his career. What happens is a continual surrender of himself to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.”
So it remains to be seen whether Kanye decides that his music is more valuable, more important and more lasting than the one thing that he sometimes seems to value the most: himself.
When will people finally wake up to the Emperor Kanye’s New Clothes? He is worthless and has pulled a con game on a bunch of idiot white people who are too afraid to admit they only see an idiot in rags.