Sunday
By day three, I’m fed up with buying $14 Fosters and $9 tacos. I’ve also figured out how to game the security guards, and we easily sneak in supplies to last the day. We munch on our deli sandwiches and sip Red Bull while Deerhunter plays hazy alt-rock through distorted speakers. They’re not very good showmen—“That’s just a little nerdy guy,” my friend Haley says dismissively of lead singer Bradford Cox—but their circular bass patterns and enveloping feedback are hypnotic.
Of course, the artist we really came to see today is Kanye, so we decide to skip out on a bunch of quality acts—sorry to the xx, Yeasayer, and Beirut—in order to camp out at the Mainstage from 4 p.m. on. (By the way, I’ve skipped over a bunch of artists that I saw but have very little to say about. MS MR, Young the Giant, Portugal.The Man, and Alt-J all were perfectly fun.) We stand through Foals and Grizzly Bear, two great bands, but through both sets, the crowd holds Kanye bigheads aloft and screams his name. Grizzly Bear frontman Ed Droste acknowledges this, asking if there’s an extra Kanye sign for when he joins us. There’s really little you can do to win the crowd when you’re opening for a man who is naming his next album “Yeezus.”
Before the man himself comes out, a huge screen above the stage goes ablaze with blinking lights: three snarling dogs bare down on the audience, their blinding teeth practically popping out of the screen, their savage barks puncturing the ear drums. They’re pretty terrifying, but harmless compared to when West emerges slowly to the rumbling synthesizers of “Black Skinhead.” The dogs are replaced by giant images of West in a black KKK robe, staring unblinkingly out into the masses; a whirlwind of grainy advertisements flash across the screen as he howls, “four in the morning, and I’m zoning / Think I’m possessed, it’s an omen” into the feedback-crazy microphone. The experience is horrific, but not in a negative way—rather, he’s found a way to channel simple images, an 808 machine, and his distorted voice into complete, visceral horror.
It’s clear that the backpacked, pink-poloed good kid is now something of a societal and artistic menace. The beats are as synthetic and abrasive as can be. The clothes are no longer laughably extravagant, but disconcertingly bare. He’s surlier than ever: it seems he never makes eye contact with his fans once, instead scanning above the crowd and into the lights. Mostly, he just looks back at the giant screen, staring wide-eyed at the psychedelic images of his own face.
The highlight of the set perhaps comes when he premieres his new song “I Am a God.” “I just talked to Jesus / He said, ‘what up, Yeezus?’” he boasts. Kanye’s self-obsession is mostly disgusting, but it’s a little hard to not believe his claims of supremacy when he’s five feet away from me, standing jauntily and surveying the mass of thousands of people below him, while they all throw up Roc-A-Fella Records signs and scream his name. The hero worship in this moment is a dark, twisted, awesome spectacle to behold.
After running through some old party classics (“Good Life,” “All Falls Down”), Kanye ends his set with a reprise of the creeping new track “New Slaves,” the hooded figures reappear, and Kanye walks off without a word. My throat is absolutely shot from three days of screaming, so I’m left to wonder to myself just what kind of monster we’ve created.
Governors Ball was a monster of another kind. It was a drenched, gut-punched monster that took a couple days to really rear back its head. And once it did, the diversity and grandiosity made it nearly overwhelming. To all the tank bros and hipster chicks, see you next year.
—Staff writer Andrew R. Chow can be reached at andrewchow@college.harvard.edu.