Last night the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the nearly century-old USC football stadium just south of downtown, was refitted to look something like a moonscape: grey padding on the ground, a large plateau in the center, synthetic smoke that at times swallowed everything it touched. The Coliseum does not have a giant video screen like many newer venues, so while this—a benefit concert for Larry Hoover, the incarcerated founder of the Gangster Disciples—was streamed live on Amazon Prime, in person there was little reminder that it existed in any context other than the running psychodrama of its two headliners.
Though Kanye West is one of Drake’s major influences and early co-signers, their relationship has turned hostile in recent years. The pair have traded barbs in their music; these are usually subliminal, with things growing more explicit on West’s Twitter feed, or by proxy, as during the Drake/Pusha-T beef of 2018. But last month, West (now legally known as Ye) visited Drake at his Toronto home and, seemingly at the behest of the Rap-A-Lot founder and general hip-hop power broker J. Prince, worked through their differences.
The reconciliation was also encouraged by Larry Hoover Jr., who appeared on Donda, West’s sprawling album from this year, to speak about his father. The elder Hoover’s case has been a fixation of West’s for some time now: In 2018, he met with Donald Trump and lobbied for his release. Hoover Sr., who was sentenced to 150 to 200 years in prison for a 1973 murder, was subsequently convicted on a variety of drug conspiracy and extortion charges for continuing to run the Gangster Disciples from behind bars. He is currently serving six life sentences at a maximum-security federal prison in Colorado, spending 23 hours a day in solitary confinement. Proceeds from the concert—and presumably the sales of $400 “FREE HOOVER” jeans—will benefit a variety of advocacy groups.
For West, this concert comes during a period of increasingly ornate one-off performances. Almost exactly five years ago, he canceled the more than 20 dates remaining on his Saint Pablo Tour and checked himself into an L.A. hospital. (He was treated for exhaustion after a “psychiatric emergency.”) The news followed a pair of shows, in Sacramento and San Jose, where he gave rambling speeches praising Donald Trump, criticizing radio programmers, and airing grievances with friends, like Jay-Z and Q-Tip. Before its dissolution, the Pablo tour was one of the most ambitiously staged rap concerts in history, with West performing from a platform that was suspended over the crowd, drifting back and forth across the expanse of an arena.
While he’s declined to schedule a more conventional tour in the half-decade since, West’s live events have grown even stranger in concept and more elaborate in execution: see the 2019 performance, with his Sunday Service choir, on the Coachella grounds that required the construction of a giant grassy mount, or the one-night-only opera, from later that year in L.A., about the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar II. Donda itself was overshadowed by a series of listening sessions for the album as it was being finished and re-finished; when West held one at Soldier Field in his native Chicago, it included a faithful recreation of his childhood home. His setlists have leaned heavily on whatever new material he’s selling at the time, and the older cuts he incorporates are often reimagined by the choir.
Last night was a sharp break from this trajectory. While the opening was sedate—choir members spread across the Coliseum’s giant steps, robed and singing slow-burn arrangements of songs by Soul II Soul, the Fugees, and West himself—the rapper soon ambled down those steps and up toward the grey mound in the center of the field. On the way there he played “Praise God,” the Baby Keem and Travis Scott collaboration from Donda. But once on the elevated stage, he ran through the hits: In the space of 16 songs, he hit The College Dropout, Late Registration, Graduation, 808s & Heartbreak, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and Yeezus, plus the 2012 G.O.O.D. Music compilation Cruel Summer. (He also covered “Find Your Love,” a song he produced and co-wrote for Drake’s 2010 debut Thank Me Later.) The newest song West played during this stretch was 2015’s “All Day.”
There was virtually no between-song banter, and West would occasionally do surgery on his older cuts—pasting the second half of verse three into verse one, etc.—either due to memory lapses or in an effort to keep the runtime under control. He also chose to censor the curse words on some songs, but not others. The performance was sometimes halting, especially early on. But by the time he cued up Late Registration’s “Touch the Sky,” he was loose and communicating the kind of delirious joy that he has so meticulously stamped out of his shows in recent years. (Look no further than the way he ended that song by singing the words “Sky high” like Big Gipp from Goodie Mobb.) The arrangements were faithful to studio versions, with small augmentations: a little AutoTune on the “All Day” hook, a Mike Dean electric guitar solo on the normally metronomic instrumental portion of “Say You Will.” It was his strongest and most coherent performance since the interrupted Pablo tour, perhaps even longer.
Drake did not fare as well. Where West pulled exclusively from the first, beloved half of his career, Drake stayed mostly in the latter half of his, offering tepid live debuts of songs from this year’s Certified Lover Boy and none of his early and mid 2010s crowd-pleasers. In fact, the contrast was so stark as to raise suspicions that the setlisting—like the “Kanye West With Special Guest Drake” billing—was a concession to the older artist agreed to beforehand. Even if that were the case, it did not seem to cause any animosity: When Drake shared the stage with West, as he did during “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and during the concert’s final stretch, which concluded with a joint performance of the inexplicably popular 2009 posse cut “Forever,” he looked ecstatic, closing his eyes and bouncing in time with the music, calling West one of his “idols.”
Neither artist spoke at any length about the prison or sentencing reform touted in press releases. (The show was preceded by a short speech from an unidentified woman encouraging the crowd to rethink models of crime and punishment.) A very generous reading would say that the very image of these men, tabloid fodder that their feud was, embracing on stage in deference to a larger cause is powerful enough. More realistically, it is further proof that no two celebrities of this magnitude, competitive and entangled as they are, can dodge the symbiotic nature of their relationship forever.
