Rapper/producer/airport-hellraiser Kanye West descended upon China last week for two installments of his Glow in the Dark tour: first at the Beijing Workers’ Stadium on November 1, and then on Shanghai’s Grand Stage two nights later.
We at the Radar can only speak for the Shanghai show, where we managed to finagle some floor passes and ended up just 15 feet away from the dandy gangster himself. A taxing 30-minute opening performance from Taiwanese-American “singer” Vanness Wu was a blight on the evening, and we shall never speak of it again.
The main event was ho-hum. Not bad per se, but it felt like Kanye was phoning it in, running down the list of his hits without breaking a sweat. Of course, Kanye probably could have come on stage with a KTV teleprompter, sat down and put his feet up while the audience took over, and the die-hard fans down in front would still have gone home happy. The crowd was ecstatic just to be in the presence of such celebrity. Kanye, on the other hand, seemed like he could take us or leave us. With minimal audience interaction, we weren’t even sure he knew where he was until he changed the lyrics of “Good Life” to say, “It feels like Shanghai…”
On the whole, it was a solid show. Vanness didn’t even manage to spoil “Good Life” when his minders allowed him back on stage for a duet. The audience got the radio friendly unit shifters they came for, but one audience member commented that the event felt more like a dress rehearsal than an actual concert. While the sound and lighting were ace, this was a seriously pared-down version of Glow in the Dark, with none of the pyrotechnics and general excess we were hoping for. The stagecraft consisted of Kanye in jeans and a hoodie, a handful of back-up musicians on an elevated platform, and two back-up singers decked out in futuristic grey-black angular ensembles straight out of The Matrix. These singers, it should be mentioned, were among our favourite aspects of the show: talented, easy on the eyes, and downright confusing (did you know the chick who repeats the worlds “flashing lights” at the beginning of “Flashing Lights” is actually a dude?).
Compare this subdued set-up with a review of the first night of the Glow in the Dark tour, last spring in Seattle: “…huge, amazing landscape set complete with reflective rolling hills and a rising, moving, smoke-spouting, underlit and overlit platform that was angled at about 30 degrees at times so that, with all the projections firing, Kanye was standing/floating in multiple planetary and atmospheric spacescapes—lava floes, explosions, waterfalls and galaxies.”
Despite reports that live music is on the rise in these parts, one of the world’s biggest pop stars didn’t even come close to selling out the 10,000-capacity venue, which by our estimation was about 70% full. Perhaps organizers Live Nation and China West could have promoted the show more heavily, but it probably wouldn’t have made a huge difference in a market where Celine Dion has more street cred than Cee-Lo. Did anyone catch Kanye’s tour in another city and manage to survive the lava floes? How did your Glow in the Dark experience stack up against Shanghai’s?