On the first night of Passover, Ye — the superstar rapper, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, the man who once threatened in a tweet to go “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” — performed for what looked like a full house at Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.
The first of a pair of Ye concerts this week at the hulking NFL palace, Wednesday’s show came two months after the 48-year-old musician apologized for his past antisemitic statements, attributing his behavior to the bipolar disorder he said developed from injuries he sustained in a 2002 car crash.
More to the point, perhaps, the gig followed last week’s release of “Bully,” Ye’s first solo LP since 2022’s “Donda 2,” which the trade journal Hits predicts will enter the album chart at No. 2, right behind the latest from BTS.
In other words, Ye’s trying to get a comeback going — and, to judge by the very warm reception he got at SoFi, he might prove successful.
He said nothing from the stage Wednesday night about his recent controversies, which included a declaration of love for Adolf Hitler and the sale of T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas. Indeed, Ye didn’t say much of anything during the two-hour concert beyond a number of reprimanding comments directed at his stage crew.
“Is this like an ‘SNL’ skit or something?” he said at one point after asking several times for “the vibrating Vegas lights” to be turned off as he performed his song “Good Life.”
“We went over this in rehearsal,” he added.
Yet with a mix of old hits and new songs from “Bully,” the show — Ye’s first full live performance in his adopted home of Los Angeles since a 2021 gig with Drake at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum — offered a powerful reminder of the prodigious musical talent that elevated Ye to the heights of celebrity from which he’s often seemed determined to fall (without ever quite doing it).
It was also a display of his flair for grand-scale spectacle: Ye performed Wednesday atop a humongous orb-shaped structure positioned on the stadium’s floor; for much of the night, digital projections made the orb into a spinning globe, as though Ye were literally on top of the world.
Not long into the set, he decided the globe was spinning too fast and asked the crew to “make the earth move slower” — an instant-classic Kanye quote to add to the trove he’s built up over the last quarter-century.
Accompanied by what sounded like prerecorded backing tracks, Ye opened with a handful of songs from “Bully,” which seeks a middle ground between the soulful, sample-heavy sound of his early work and the gloomier, synthed-up vibe of more recent records like “Donda” and his and Ty Dolla Sign’s “Vultures 1” and “Vultures 2.”
You wouldn’t say “Bully” is particularly good; the beats are polished but unsurprising while Ye’s vocals lack anything even close to the emotional urgency that defines his greatest work. (One thread in the discourse around the album is the question of how much AI was involved in its creation.)
Here, though, songs like “Father” and “All the Love” had a certain dark allure as they boomed through a stadium filled with smoke from what must have been a dozen or more machines.
Or at least they did until Ye reached back for his vastly superior oldies, which can still astound you with their feeling and humor and invention. Vaguely depressing new stuff out of the way, he strung together snippets of all-timers like “Father, Stretch My Hands, Pt. 1,” “Mercy,” “Black Skinhead” and “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” as the crowd rapped along with nearly every word; he did “Bound 2,” a high point of his Kardashian-era swagger, and he did “Heartless,” a potent demonstration of his influence as an emo-rap pioneer.
He also did his and Jay-Z’s deathless 2011 hit — the one whose title contains the N-word — which made you think about how he and his old frenemy are both mounting comebacks at the same time, Jay-Z as a kind of retiree’s victory lap and Ye in hopes of moving past a mess of his own making.
Ye, whose return will continue with a handful of European concerts this summer, brought out two guests at SoFi: Don Toliver, with whom he performed “Moon” and Toliver’s “E65,” and Ye’s 12-year-old daughter, North, who did “Talking” and “Piercing on My Hand.”
Yet as he finished the show with a solo sprint through some of his most beloved hits — “All Falls Down,” “Jesus Walks,” “Through the Wire,” “All of the Lights” — the image Ye seemed to want to project was that of a man confronting a reproving public all by himself.
Except nobody in here was against him.
He closed with “Runaway,” his soap-operatic 2010 warning to anyone foolish enough to consider falling in love with him.
“Run away fast as you can,” he sang, and the crowd roared.
