I know, how GQ of me
Hip-hop icons Jay-Z and Kanye West have been quite the talk of the town lately. They released an album together titled WATCH THE THRONE, which contains great songs and not so great songs. What I have heard about the most though it the obscene price they charges for show tickets. Tickets I would quality as "not shitty" were all about two hundred bones. It's a lot of money. Of course I wasn't going to pay this much to see those two play. I like them, but I don't LOVE them. But thanks to a good friend of Josie that we'll call "Meg", who could pimp out free tickets to the comeback tour of Jesus if she wanted to, we had free tickets to the show. Really, really good free tickets. If we were any closer, Kanye would have sweated on me.
Here's some unfair math for you. The white and the blue section in the Bell Center were crammed full because they were the affordable tickets (under two hundred), but the red section (the decent tickets) wasn't completely full and it was peppered with people like us, who paid nothing at all for an awesome show. Because it was absolutely great. The two titans of rap performed their best songs (Kanye left out Dark Fantasy, meh) is front of a raving crowd. While I felt a bit like an intruder (I like hip-hop, but I'm not crazy about it), it was good to hear Jay-Z do his old-school songs like DIRT OFF YOUR SHOULDER and IZZO (H.O.V.A), while Kayne well...was equal to himself. Guy has the biggest ego, but he can perform. JESUS WALKS and POWER, as well as his RUNAWAY-HEARTLESS-STRONGER segments were impressive.
The crowd was a weird bunch, because both rappers appeal to a very different fan base and the fact that many male spectators were doing Movember made it even more confusing. See, as Jay-Z is a MC in the traditional sense of the term, the spectrum of Kanye West's music is a little more broad. It goes from hip-hop to RnB to all-out electronic music, which brings out the more artsy-fartsy crowd and inevitably the hipsters. They are at every show where their physical health isn't threatened (that leaves out the liked of MOTÖRHEAD and MEGADETH), but you can never really guess whether their involvement is ironic or not. The Movember crowd made it even weirder, because you could see a guy with a full blown mustache and a cardigan, dancing away, his soul enslaved by the music. I had no idea who in the crowd were the hipsters and I thought it was fucking great.
While I thought Jay-Z performed really well and was in surprisingly good shape (he looked like a guy who had lost a lot of weight. Not naturally thin, but you know. Thin), but as far as live performance goes, Kanye West is something else. Jay-Z has built an empire with Roc-A-Fella records, but he didn't exactly innovate. I always thought his music to be commercial and safe, in general. Kanye West keeps risking and trying different approach, which seems to be based on the mood he's in. You can tell (well, at least I could tell, from where I was) that performing still has a visceral appeal to him and his songs take life when he performs them, like they took like when he first wrote them on paper.
The traditional style of hip-hop performers is based on outside approval of the crowd, the homies, whoever it is. Whether it's "look, I have money" or "look, life is tough", it's a very kinetic performance that couldn't go on without a public to approve. Whenever Kanye West is on stage, he looks in some sort of trance, like we weren't even there. His music comes from an inner vision (which he values sometimes more than his fanbase does), but it makes it quite an intense performer.
The WATCH THE THRONE show was amazing, but it was even more amazing because it was free
Here's some unfair math for you. The white and the blue section in the Bell Center were crammed full because they were the affordable tickets (under two hundred), but the red section (the decent tickets) wasn't completely full and it was peppered with people like us, who paid nothing at all for an awesome show. Because it was absolutely great. The two titans of rap performed their best songs (Kanye left out Dark Fantasy, meh) is front of a raving crowd. While I felt a bit like an intruder (I like hip-hop, but I'm not crazy about it), it was good to hear Jay-Z do his old-school songs like DIRT OFF YOUR SHOULDER and IZZO (H.O.V.A), while Kayne well...was equal to himself. Guy has the biggest ego, but he can perform. JESUS WALKS and POWER, as well as his RUNAWAY-HEARTLESS-STRONGER segments were impressive.
The crowd was a weird bunch, because both rappers appeal to a very different fan base and the fact that many male spectators were doing Movember made it even more confusing. See, as Jay-Z is a MC in the traditional sense of the term, the spectrum of Kanye West's music is a little more broad. It goes from hip-hop to RnB to all-out electronic music, which brings out the more artsy-fartsy crowd and inevitably the hipsters. They are at every show where their physical health isn't threatened (that leaves out the liked of MOTÖRHEAD and MEGADETH), but you can never really guess whether their involvement is ironic or not. The Movember crowd made it even weirder, because you could see a guy with a full blown mustache and a cardigan, dancing away, his soul enslaved by the music. I had no idea who in the crowd were the hipsters and I thought it was fucking great.
While I thought Jay-Z performed really well and was in surprisingly good shape (he looked like a guy who had lost a lot of weight. Not naturally thin, but you know. Thin), but as far as live performance goes, Kanye West is something else. Jay-Z has built an empire with Roc-A-Fella records, but he didn't exactly innovate. I always thought his music to be commercial and safe, in general. Kanye West keeps risking and trying different approach, which seems to be based on the mood he's in. You can tell (well, at least I could tell, from where I was) that performing still has a visceral appeal to him and his songs take life when he performs them, like they took like when he first wrote them on paper.
The traditional style of hip-hop performers is based on outside approval of the crowd, the homies, whoever it is. Whether it's "look, I have money" or "look, life is tough", it's a very kinetic performance that couldn't go on without a public to approve. Whenever Kanye West is on stage, he looks in some sort of trance, like we weren't even there. His music comes from an inner vision (which he values sometimes more than his fanbase does), but it makes it quite an intense performer.
The WATCH THE THRONE show was amazing, but it was even more amazing because it was free
