Music Review: Kanye West

Published on Monday 17 November 2008 19:02

KANYE WEST ***** SECC, GLASGOW

THE LAST time US hip-hop sensation Kanye West was in town he brought backing singers, robot mime artists and a full string section, but the majority of this show was just about him alone. Well, that said, there was a full band on a hydraulic platform below the stage. And he was backed by possibly the biggest digital screen the SECC has ever witnessed, plus probably more dry ice, pyrotechnics and explosive sci-fi graphics than all the Star Wars films combined. The man doesn't really do things by halves.

Glow in the Dark is a kind of multimillion dollar globetrotting hip-hop opera, in which West plays a marooned galactic explorer, forlornly rapping away to himself on a barren lunar landscape. The plot, as it were, is fairly asinine (has weird tryst with a semi-pornographic hologram, apologises to God, sings song for his late mum, goes home), but aesthetically it's fresh, ambitious and awe-strikingly stylish. Well, apart from the ten-foot rubber B-movie monster.

West's rhymes flowed heavy and constant throughout to thick walls of synthesised strings, pounding tribal drums and samples ranging from Shirley Bassey in Diamonds From Sierra Leone to Daft Punk in bombastic anthem Stronger. For all the show's expensive embellishments, it was West's sleek, nimble performance that you couldn't take your eyes off of – he is, after all, the "brightest star in the universe", as some saucily-voiced passing planets, or shooting stars, or whatever the heck they were meant to be reminded him.

Coming from just about anyone else, such gauche ego-buffing would have seemed tongue in cheek, but considering West's all-conquering self-regard, he likely believes it too. His final act of braggadocio was an apology for making it impossible for anyone in the crowd to again enjoy a live show, since he'd just treated them to "the greatest concert ever". It wasn't quite all that, but it was very, very good.