The most disappointing pop performance I’ve ever seen – and in the course of my 15-odd years as a music critic I saw an awful lot – was Kanye West at Glastonbury in 2015. Perhaps he was making some kind of ironic statement on the nature of celebrity and fan expectation: blinding lights all focused on himself; no attempts to engage with the crowd; relentless, mechanical rapping but with most of the amusing samples and catchy hooks removed, the better to punish us all by ordeal with loud, righteous verbiage.
But I still admire this irritating genius hugely because besides making often very addictive albums he refuses to play the game – publicly insulting the (supposedly) most squeaky clean star in the industry Taylor Swift, making nice (at least for a period) with President Trump, preferring to rap eloquently about quotidian experience (e.g. breaking his jaw in a serious car accident) rather than about the usual gangster fodder of gats and hos.
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