At least as the stage design suggested, Ye (the artist formerly known as Kanye West) was standing on top of the world last night at Inglewood, CA’s SoFi Stadium — a barely veiled metaphor strung across the first of two sold-out comeback concerts at the 70,000-capacity venue. For a leisurely paced two hours, Ye delivered a performance as only Ye would do: atop a massive half-orb plunked in the middle of the stadium floor as perfectly timed bursts of fireworks and zooming lasers punctuated the hits at play.
Of course, at the heart of it was the man himself, a deeply polarising music icon whose years-long tirades against everyone from Jewish people to his peers tainted a legacy that once seemed unimpeachable. The performance, touted as his first show in the United States since 2021, marks the beginning of what appears to be a carefully crafted comeback. In January, he took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal asking for forgiveness and attributing his behaviour — which included baldly declaring “I am a Nazi” and releasing the single “Heil Hitler” — to his bipolar type-1 diagnosis, which prompted a “four-month-long manic episode of psychotic, paranoid and impulsive behavior that destroyed my life.”
Not coincidentally, just days later, it was announced that Ye had signed a seven-figure record deal with Gamma, a multi-platform music company that has recently released new albums from Mariah Carey and Usher. All of this was pushing towards “Bully,” his twelfth album that he initially teased as the soundtrack to a Hype Williams-directed short film in March 2025. The early preview of the record signalled something of a return to form, at least musically: artfully deployed chipmunk soul samples topped with lyrics that were unblemished by the hateful vitriol he’d regularly deployed on social media, or on his leaked album “Cuck,” a brazen lyrical minefield.
“Bully” took over a year to finally materialise on streaming services, arriving last Saturday following a period of unusual public silence from Ye. It’s a surprisingly pleasant record for the rapper, who polished up some of the early iterations of the tracks and removed the use of A.I. (or most traces of it, depending on which side you fall). It recalls the crate-digging Ye we once knew — songs like “Beauty and the Beast” and “Whatever Works” coast on mesmerising soul loops — while reintroducing Ye as a more subdued showman, albeit one without the fiery flow that supercharged hits like “Power” and “All of the Lights.”
This newly minted version of Ye was on full display at SoFi Stadium, where he stood atop a demi-globe, tethered to its apex, to perform old hits and select songs from “Bully.” Perhaps it was the intrigue, or even nostalgia, that drew the 70,000 attendees to SoFi Stadium, but the thunderous reaction from the crowd suggested that there’s a path forward for Ye when the music is prioritised above all else.
Ye didn’t address the crowd much, or at all, throughout the performance, only taking breaks between songs to fine-tune the production and, in one oft-shared moment, scold his lighting director. “I don’t have my vocal in my ear,” he said as he felt his way through “King,” the sniping “Bully” opener. “Make the earth move slower,” he later commanded. “I don’t like when these lights move like that, like a disco and shit,” he said at the start of “Good Life.” He had to reset the song two more times to get it right. “Is this like an ‘SNL’ skit or something? Stop doing the vibrating Vegas lights, bro. We went over this in rehearsal.”
That’s about as much as the old Kanye — the one whose perfectionism is so paramount that it translates to comedy — to appear during the show. At first, it seemed like he’d be performing “Bully” in its entirety, beginning with the four songs that frontload the project (and later, for some reason, performing them again mid-show). But mainly, it was like a greatest hits revue, a reinforcement that amid all the controversy and calls for cancellation, his greatest weapon is the songs that, like it or not, are woven into the fabric of modern music.
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At the start of the show, Ye appeared tentative, as if finding his footing again despite recent performances in Mexico City and China. But he gradually settled into himself as he worked his way back through his discography and the crowd responded to the familiarity of his biggest hits. There were the canonical songs — “Can’t Tell Me Nothing,” “Heartless,” “Through the Wire,” “All Falls Down” — and deeper cuts, including “Blood on the Leaves,” “Bound 2” and “Say You Will.” He stood atop the globe as Jay-Z’s verse from “N—s in Paris” echoed through the stadium, and brought out his daughter North West and Don Toliver.
It was difficult at times to ascertain whether he was rapping live, as fog swallowed the stage and shrouded him in darkness. Oftentimes, the backing track very clearly overpowered his vocals. But that was of little concern to those who seemed to forget about the very heavy baggage accompanying the performance. It was an evening to remember the greatness of Ye as he once was, and perhaps still is: imaginative, boundlessly creative and transformative. As the unmistakable notes of “Runaway” rang out to close the show, the crowd seemed to concede that, at least for one night, not everything had been lost along the way.
From Variety US