Sep 28, 2015

Kanye West performed his special “808s & Heartbreak” show at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday.

LOS ANGELES — We are living in an age of Kanye West’s bliss. It wasn’t always clear that we’d get here.

For long stretches of the last few years, he’d been aggrieved, dissatisfied, angsty. The system — the music business, the fashion industry, American society, you name it — was letting him down, and he wasn’t content to let that go without comment.

But lately, publicly, at least, he has been soothed. He is married, to Kim Kardashian. They have a daughter, North, and a son on the way. A couple of weeks ago, Mr. West presented his second show at New York Fashion Week, an achievement he’d been working toward for years. A few weeks before that, at the MTV Video Music Awards, he was presented with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award and gave a 10-minute speech about inspiration. Sometimes the paparazzi even catch him smiling.

So it’s an unusual moment for him to choose to revisit what was almost certainly his emotional nadir, and the art that came from it. But there he was Friday night, at the Hollywood Bowl here, playing the first of two shows dedicated to his 2008 album “808s & Heartbreak” (Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam), one of the most radical left turns by a modern-day pop star and an album of acute pain.


Kanye West, right, with Kid Cudi, during his “808s & Heartbreak” show on Friday at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.

The Kanye West of “808s” was confronting how much of a lie fame was, and how flimsy its advantages really were. In the months leading up to the album’s release, his mother died, from complications of cosmetic surgery, and he ended an engagement with a longtime girlfriend. So Mr. West was in reckoning mode: “My friend showed me pictures of his kids/and all I could show him was pictures of my cribs,” he rap-sings at the beginning of “Welcome to Heartbreak,” the album’s second song. He’d released three triple-platinum albums and what had it gotten him?

“808s” became Mr. West’s first disruption. Each of his earlier albums, and some of the later ones as well, are extensions of — or conclusions to — ideas that predate him. They ensured his place in hip-hop’s canon. “808s,” though, made the case that he was capable of writing hip-hop history from scratch. Rather than make another ornate hip-hop symphony rooted in late-90s excess and early-90s social politics, he opted instead to start from whole cloth: he sang, he used Auto-Tune, he delved wholly and deeply into his emotional neuroses and fears. In so doing, he drew a blueprint for a next generation of artists to remake hip-hop’s center: “So Far Gone,” the mixtape that birthed modern-day Drake, and by extension the sound of contemporary hip-hop, was released just three months after “808s.” At the time, “808s” was Mr. West’s least commercially successful album, but it is in no way his least impactful. (Look for “Yeezus” to serve a similar function — there may well be concerts devoted to West’s 2013 album in five or so years, once its impact is truly felt.)

On stage here, he played “808s” as a sort of Greek tragedy. Outfitted in druid chic, drapey garments in shades of white and off-white, Mr. West largely kept his energy centered and mellow. Backed by a small band and a medium-sized orchestra, he cast these songs as meditations, especially on tracks from the first half of the album like “Welcome to Heartbreak” and “Heartless.”

For part of the show, he was flanked by dozens of shirtless men caked with white powder, who stood behind him in a phalanx during “Amazing” and later, on “Love Lockdown,” spread through the crowd, taking up sentry positions in the aisles. (This was one of a few stagings arranged by the artist Vanessa Beecroft, a frequent West collaborator.) Fireworks occasionally shot out into the sky.

Mr. West’s approach came fully into focus in the second half of the night, with the album’s most moody and aching songs. At the conclusion of “Bad News,” gunshot noises rang out and Mr. West staggered around the stage, eventually collapsing facedown on the ground as the string section throbbed urgently, almost like a boot on his neck. On “See You in My Nightmares,” he asked for the backing track to be cut so that he could be accompanied by a moping piano.

At the beginning of “Coldest Winter,” about the death of his mother, several women outfitted in ivory sheaths and hijabs wheeled out a slab bearing a woman in repose. Fake snow dropped onto the stage and crowd as Mr. West sat on a large staircase and intensely memorialized his mother.

But the tour de force was “Pinocchio Story,” the album’s final track, and on the record, something of a ramble. “Maybe that was all my fault,” he muses on this song, looking at himself “chasing the American dream” as the cause of his problems.

For this closing number, Mr. West re-emerged encased in burlap from head to toe, like a mummy or walking pincushion, and ambled around the stage. Even though his eyes weren’t visible and he could make only the most cursory of gestures because of the thickness of his outfit, he somehow managed an intense emotional bluntness that was overwhelming. “You’ll never figure out real love,” the song goes, but here, at the end, he shouted, “I feel so much love tonight!”

As an album, “808s” is not without its eccentricities and its missteps — several songs have overlong outros that serve largely as distractions, and at this show, there were some stretches that split the difference between artistic statement and confusion. At one point, during “See You in My Nightmares,” when the music wasn’t going quite how he wanted it, Mr. West joked that the show was “the best dress rehearsal I ever had.” (To that point, when Young Jeezy emerged for his verse on “Amazing,” he was perhaps the only one of the 17,000 or so in attendance who didn’t know all the words.)

As recently as two years ago, Mr. West met an onstage glitch with a bark: “Everybody fired!” But there was none of that fury here. Mr. West’s animating tension has always been the one he feels between pleasing the world and keeping himself safe from its vagaries, between being an entertainer and being the entertainment.

But at his peak, Mr. West can do both at the same time, giving everything while keeping something for himself. Uncharacteristically, this concert was terse — just over an hour, with no non-“808s” material and no encore, though Mr. West did end the night with all of the musicians and performers aligned in an impressive monochromatic row. As they all held hands and took a bow, as if they’d just completed a Broadway production, Mr. West smiled widely, and hugged several of them before walking offstage.