Sit back, my friends, and let me tell you a tale of clusterfuckery like the world has never seen.
A bit of background--Kanye West is one of the world's top artists, and he is currently touring with a giant stage show known as the Glow in the Dark tour. So it was surprising to me when they initially scheduled him for a non-headlining set on the smaller Which stage, particularly when his set was in the early evening, making the whole Glow in the Dark thing problematic. But what do I know--I'm not a concert promoter.
I know quite a bit, apparently, because about a week ago they announced that Kanye would be doing his full GitD set on the main stage as a "late night" set, which at Bonnaroo means you start at 2:45AM. That was fine with me--I'm a big Kanye fan, so I got there at about 2:00 and secured a plum spot up near the front.
2:45 rolled around and they still seemed to be sliding a lot of great big set pieces around. An LCD screen suspended in the middle of the stage was raised and lowered dozens of times, with guys running up to fiddle with it each time. Finally around 3:00 the big screens that said "KANYE WEST UP NEXT!" were changed to "FESTIVAL ALERT: KANYE WEST NOW AT 3:15AM". OK, I thought, I've waited this long, what's another 15 minutes?
At 3:15, the sign changed again: "FESTIVAL ALERT: KANYE WEST NOW AT 3:30AM". I had a sense of deja vu from several unfortunate trips to the airport. When 3:30 came around they must have realized they were just pissing us off, so the sign reverted to "KANYE WEST UP NEXT!", because they figured there was an odds-on chance of that turning out to be true.
The LCD screen they had been fiddling with all night at one point developed a red streak in the corner that wouldn't go away. My suspicion is that it was hit by a flying glowstick, as the bored crowd was tossing them around in between boos and chants of "WHAT THE FUCK? WHAT THE FUCK?" They must have decided there was nothing to be done about it, so the distraction remained there through the entire set.
It was about 4:27 when the lights finally went down and the intro started. The show itself ties Kanye's hits together with a loose, silly, and poorly acted story about crashing a spaceship on Mars, but it's mostly an excuse for the cool space effects on the big screens. I would go so far as to say it had the potential to be a good show, but it was downed by two major problems here: first, I'm not sure Kanye's energy matched the energy of the show itself, and it damn sure didn't match the energy of the tired, pissed-off, frustrated audiece, which was probably cut in half by the time the show started and had people leaving in droves the entire time.
Second, again, this is the Glow in the Dark tour, and a lot of those cool lighting effects require darkness. This is the edge of the Central time zone, so the sun starts coming up around 5:00. By the end of his main set at 5:30 or so, it was almost broad daylight.
When he left the stage barely an hour into his set, we all stood by and waited for the encore, but instead some music came up on the PA and the techies re-emerged on the stage. Really? All that shit for a set that wasn't even an hour? As the crowd filed out, their exhaustion was replaced by an energetic anger. "FUCK KANYE WEST" was heard from all quarters.
Some in the crowd were speculating that the delay was not technical, because the techies weren't moving very fast for people who were an hour behind, so they had probably been asked to drag their heels to cover for Kanye. I'm getting ready to head to today's press conference, where we'll have one big question: "Regarding Kanye West: dude, WTF?"
wtf is he doing at bonnaroo anyways, he sucks
Posted by: me | January 01, 2009 at 04:06 PM