Kanye West capped off Governors Ball in a legendary performance that will have people talking about it for many years and Governors Ball festivals to come.
I got worried as Kanye West was 20 minutes late, but it was just Kanye being Kanye. He didn’t waste any time welcoming the crowd to his new era, kicking into mind-bending renditions of his new songs “Black Skinhead” & “New Slaves.” The tracks were monsters live, creating quite the stir all across the island crowd.
From there we got to here a few new songs that were anywhere from sounding like industrial rock to electronic Daft Punk like. Any fan of Kanye couldn’t have been disappointed by his set, it was basically a quick whiplash run through of his greatest hits. “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”, “Power”, “Jesus Walks”, “Heartless”, “Flashing Lights”, “Stronger”. He did so in rapid fire pace, starting the next song just as the last barely finished.
The best part of the show was Kanye’s rant mid-show, something that is commonplace at his shows. Even he was in on the joke, as he prefaced his rant by saying “This is the part of the show where I start complaining about shit.” before lamenting on how he was sick of the system of the music industry and wanted to just please the fans. He then said “I’m just happy to be making music and happy to be performing for you all. You know for this album, we didn’t drop a single to radio, we ain’t have no big NBA campaign, we don’t even have a cover. We only made real music.” “Back then we used to go work on an album for like 5 months, then we’d come back and wait for the label to pick the perfect time to release it. The next line is what really made me realize that Kanye really is ahead of the rest of the pack:
“When you listen to radio, that isn’t where I want to be any more. And, honestly, at this point, I could give a f–k about selling a million records. I’ll drop it when I want and I’ll sell more records. Because at this point, I don’t really care about outside opinions. The only thing I care about is my clique.”
Hate him or love him, but he knows what he is doing. He gave an unforgettable performance Sunday night and ended the festival with a show that I will never forget.
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