Kanye’s Still Performing All Of His Songs In The Dark

Like vampires or Batman, Kanye really hates lights. Across his three previous albums, the guy’s regularly used ‘lights’ as a metaphor for the perils of fame and other sad shit, from Graduation‘s ‘Flashing Lights’ to 808s & Heartbreak’s ‘Street Lights’ and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy‘s ‘All Of The Lights’. That’s all good as a lyrical motif, but the idea doesn’t quite translate so well to live performances.

Kanye introduced the stage idea at last month’s Miley Cyrus Twerk Awards, where his emotional performances of ‘Black Skinhead’ and ‘Blood On The Leaves’ were overshadowed by… well, shadows. Over the weekend, he continued the trend on the UK music show Later… With Jools Holland, where he performed in the dark again — firstly, with a dramatic, stripped-back version of ‘New Slaves’ that was all piano loops and Charlie Wilson ad-libs, and secondly, a livelier but still ridiculously under-lit version of ‘Blood On The Leaves’.

They would probably be a couple of great performances if I had a torch.

In more illuminating news (zing!), Kanye also took part in a LONG interview with BBC Radio 1 DJ Zane Lowe, which is due to be released in four parts (FOUR-PARTS!) over the course of this week. It marks Kanye’s first interview since that embarrassing thing with his mother-in-law a few weeks ago in which he kept referring to families as “brands”.

BBC released an intriguing teaser to the interview, which sees Kanye rocking grills and randomly yelling things like “No flip-flops for black dudes!” (a rule that I think should also be extended to the wider population) and “WE THE REAL ROCKSTARS AND I’M THE BIGGEST OF ALL OF THEM! I’M THE #1 ROCK STAR ON THE PLANET.”

And to finally conclude today’s Kanye news round-up, here’s a couple of pictures of him partying with P. Diddy and Oprah and Kim Kardashian and some dude that looks like sickly Tom Hanks but probably isn’t last night.

Oh, so when Oprah’s around lights are fine?