Awesome / Kanye West

---

• His performance of "Jesus Walks" at the Grammys. For all his douchebag moments, never let it be said that he can't put on a show.
• And his performance of Stronger for the Glow In The Dark tour.
• Kanye doing the Carlton dance to the song Take On Me.
• How about that one performance of "Gold Digger" where he brought out an entire college marching band?
• "Let's have a toast for the douchebags..."
• His performance headlining at the Coachella festival in 2011 is being called "career-defining". That's with him singing/trying to sing the Heartbreak songs sans Auto-Tune and with him fucking up the lyrics on two of his earlier songs.
• To the readers of Pitchfork, the 10.0 rating received by My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy qualifies. To put this in perspective, this was the first perfect rating Pitchfork had given to a new studio album in eight years; and one of only twelve albums to receive the rating on its initial release (its not uncommon for re-issues and retrospective reviews to get 10/10 scores).
• Using clips from Blades of Glory in "Niggas in Paris". It fits perfectly because the song does get the people going!
• The guerrilla promotion of Yeezus to an extent. He didn't make a video for "New Slaves" but rather a video projection of his face rapping to the song in 66 cities across the world. Despite no radio singles and no true music videos, Yeezus still debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200, and with critical acclaim to boot.
• "Black Skinhead"'s spine-chilling SNL debut.
• Kanye and Jay-Z playing "Niggas in Paris" not once, not twice, but eleven times back-to-back at the end of the Watch the Throne tour as a result of Serial Escalation over the course of the tour. The end result is almost an hour long.
• Kanye's verse on "New God Flow" is brilliant on its own, but there's something about this live performance that makes it so much better. Perhaps it's the Mic Drop at the end.
• His speech after winning a Grammy for College Dropout, seen by many as one of his most legendary moments, especially the ending:
  "Everybody want to know what I would do if I didn't win... I guess we'll never know."
• Kanye's Take That! at Ray J in "Highlights", replying to Ray's claim that he "hit it first"—with "it" being Kanye's wife Kim Kardashian. The fact of the matter is that Kanye's so far ahead compared to Ray (Kanye's net worth is $145 million compared to Ray's $6 million) that he doesn't care, and while Ray got a few nights with Kim, Kanye got a lifetime commitment. It's not about who hit it first, but who hit it right. And despite the eventual divorce, Kanye still won considering he was able to have a family, with children who love him and a woman who stood by him for so long.
• Hey Mama Day, a fan-created "holiday" in which Kanye fans repeatedly streamed "Hey Mama" for 12 hours straight to both respect Kanye's late mother Donda and keep Taylor Swift's album Reputation (which released on the 10th anniversary of Donda's death) off the charts. Its effect was so powerful, it even got coverage from several news outlets!
• In the book "Kanye West: God & Monster," there was an interview in which Kanye admitted that people would tell him that he couldn't rap and that he wouldn't sell a record. Come many years later, and Kanye's had a lot of hits, best selling albums, and Grammys. Not too bad for someone who "couldn't rap."
• Kanye and Kid Cudi's Kids See Ghosts project getting an incredibly rare 10/10 from The Needle Drop, the first one since Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly.
• In the 2012 edition of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, how many albums from Kanye were in the list? Three, with Late Registration being the highest ranked at #118. In the 2020 updated list, how many albums are now? His first six studio albums, with My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy being the highest ranked at #17, the highest that any 21st century album on the list holds.
• Pick any of the Donda listening events. No, seriously, any of them. All three of them, especially the second and third ones, were downright bone chillingly. Especially Kanye being lifted into the fucking sky in the second event.
  • The second event was rather uneventful, but the last one? Featured a replica of Kanye's childhood home with a cross on top, arguably as a symbolic visage to his late mother.
  • Near the end, Kanye had himself set on fire. And he walked out like it was just a normal night.

---