"Performing live is the reason why we make music," Kanye West said in the announcement for his Touch the Sky Tour. "I think about how audiences are going to respond to hooks and intros and certain lines when I'm in the studio recording. Bringing these songs to the stage is the ultimate fulfillment of the creative process."
There is no question that Kanye exists on the cutting edge of live musical performance. In the past decade, with the help of his stage designer Esmeralda Devlin, he has pushed the boundaries of the medium more than any artist on the planet. In this article, we explore the evolution of Kanye's stage design from the 2004 College Dropout Tour to the Saint Pablo Tour, which is currently underway.
The College Dropout Tour (2004)
Kanye's first headlining tour is only tour that did not feature the stage design of Es Devlin. Not surprisingly, it was spartan by the extravagant standards of his later tour productions. The 4:30 mark of the video embedded below offers a snapshot of his performance backdrop: a row of narrow LED screens standing in front of a static shot of the Chicago skyline.
The Touch The Sky Tour (2005)
A few months before Kanye's Touch the Sky Tour, he rose from the grave wearing a pair of colossal white angel wings at the 2005 Grammys; he had already made known his capacity for bombast. Kanye had tremendously high expectations for his second tour. Two weeks before the first show, he fired his stage designer and hired Devlin.
She positioned a six-piece, all-female string section on a platform behind Kanye and projected negative reviews of his music and temperament onto the big screen. Began one: "The second release by the most obnoxious, egotistical, self-centered hip hop artist in the history of obnoxious..."
The Glow in the Dark Tour (2008)
The Glow in the Dark Tour fully realized Kanye's live ambitions. Joined by Rihanna, N.E.R.D., & Lupe Fiasco, he embarked on a six-month trek across the globe with a folder of colorful science fiction space-scapes and luminescent monsters. He performed in a sea of dramatically lit billowing dry ice from atop a raised platform, which he based on the following concept sketch he posted to his blog:
In his book "Kanye West: God & Monster," Mark Beaumont described the Glow in the Dark Tour like this:
"The production was an elaborate attempt to push hip-hop into the arena rock league, a concept show based around Kanye as the pilot of a spaceship hitting a meteor storm and crashing onto a rocky planet drenched in dry ice and and overlooked by aliens in floating bubbles. [The show opened] with 'Good Morning' and [continued with] a stunning string of hits as Kanye dramatically attempted to make it home... [It was a] tale of desperate isolation in a seething sci-fi landscape, albeit one incongruously visited by a large gold-painted woman on a screen for 'Gold Digger.'"
The Watch The Throne Tour (2011)
Kanye upped the ante one again on his and Jay Z's Watch the Throne Tour. He instructed Devlin to pursue a course in the direction of “Attenborough BBC wildlife content and lasers." She responded by placing Kanye and Hov atop their own massive cubes -- each cube a four-paneled video screen showing rabid Rottweilers, sharks, crows, & tigers -- and immersing them in an unrelenting firefight of laser beams. Eventually, the duo came out together on the mainstage to perform “Otis" in front of a giant American flag.
The Yeezus Tour (2013)
If the Watch the Throne Tour was about 90-degree angles, The Yeezus Tour was about diagonals. Like a mountain goat, Kanye performed from the side of a perilous, jagged peak, dubbed by some as "Mount Yeezus.". A slanted projector screen leered down at the crowd. Engineers equipped another triangular stage further out in the audience with hydraulics so that it leaned back to form a sort of Pride Rock, a hill with a beam of light at its summit that beckoned to Kanye. Kanye donned a custom Margiela mask and staged the resurrection of Jesus, giving the whole production a surreal blend of the futuristic and the apocryphal.
The Yeezus Tour received a lengthy write-up in a respected architecture publication.
The openers: Kendrick Lamar, A Tribe Called Quest, Travis Scott, and Pusha T.
The Saint Pablo Tour (2016)
Last summer at Glastonbury, Kanye stepped onto a crane and took flight over a sea of humans. In retrospect, it was a clear forerunner to the stage suspended 20-feet above the arena floor that one year later would serve as the centerpiece of his "minimalist maximalist" Saint Pablo Tour.
Cassper Nyovest has accused Kanye of swaggerjacking his floating stage, but even if his claim is true, Kanye evolved the concept. Nyoyest's stage did not move and his arena had no ambience; Kanye rigged his stage to cruise and lurch through a hellish orange-red fog.