Ye's Saint Pablo Tour
Los Angeles | November 1, 2016
The apex of Ye’s The Life of Pablo era was the spectacular and austere Saint Pablo Tour. Much has been made of the audacity of the floating stage. A heaving, mechanical monstrosity upon which Ye descended and ascended above and amongst the crowd, befitted with dozens of vintage PAR cans for a singular tone and texture of light. Certain moments of the performance felt dizzyingly intimate, in which he felt close enough to reach out and touch. Others, grandiose and surreal, as the opening of the show in which the motorized stage gasped to life and lurched towards the crowd, accompanied by Cudi’s wailing refrain on ‘Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1’.
The ephemeral situation created by the tour’s unique spatial configuration was one of the most vivid expressions of Ye’s singular, problematic, transcendent vision. With the crowd shrouded in a dense fog and the conceptual boundary of the stage removed, we became part of his world for just a moment, whether we liked it or not. The space directly below the stage turned into a roving, diffuse mosh pit, coalescing in a frenzy during a breathless performance of ‘Black Skinhead’. Up top, Ye was tethered to the stage platform by a rope and harness, which limited his range of movement to keep him from falling over the edge. His presence tested the limits of restraint in the face of the desire to dissolve the boundary between himself and the audience.
Just a few weeks later, the tour would come to an unexpected close in Sacramento, with Ye playing a three-song set before leaving the stage and canceling the remaining dates. Despite the increasing scale and intricacy of global pop tours in the years since, none have succeeded in executing spectacle with this level of focus and rigor.
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