Some days Kanye West is sacred, and some days he is profane. Sorting out which ones are which can be a slippery challenge, shaped by one’s tolerance for dissonance, appreciation for the tension between spirit and action, and capacity for forgiveness.
Kanye has apparently been searching for calm. An urge toward purification has seemed to be at work in the intimate, invite-only sessions — Sunday Service, they’re called — he’s been leading in Calabasas, Calif., since January. Clips of the performances have trickled out into the world via social media, primarily on his wife Kim Kardashian West’s Instagram. The aesthetic is one of healing — dozens of performers dressed in all white reimagining popular songs as quasi-religious balms.
On Sunday morning, West brought a grander-scaled version of these sessions to the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival for an Easter morning concert. Or convocation. Or ablution. For more than two hours, West was the captain but not the performer, the architect of a formidable and lustrous presentation, but also in many ways, just a humble congregant.
Since the beginning of his career, West has been making the case for the spiritual impulse in secular spaces. That was the underlying theme of this service — and it functioned far more like a church service than a concert — an argument the performance returned to again and again, interspersing sacred music with soul and hip-hop and even house music, declining to draw barriers between them while contending that belief could be found inside any of them.
Yes, the gospel is the stuff of church. But as the song selections at Coachella revealed, the gospel is in plain sight, too. It is there in Stevie Wonder’s “As,” which the choir howled joyously...READ MORE
