Music

Kanye's Glastonbury set was good but the BBC's subtitles were amazing

by Richard Howard

Sorry, 134,000 Brits that signed the petition to have Kanye West removed as the Glastonbury Festival’s headliner – it happened anyway. And you know what? It was pretty damned good. West poured his heart and soul out for nearly two hours with nary a ‘the world’s against me’ rant to be heard. (He did inform the crowd that they were “now watching the greatest living rock star on the planet,” but c’mon – what’s the point of seeing Kanye with no Kanye hyperbole?) The stage design had a lot of strength in simplicity – bright, ultra low hanging lights emphasized the fact that there was one guy on this massive stage.

He included all his smash hits in the set along with a number of rarely performed tracks, and as his only big name guest brought on Bon Iver frontman Justin Vernon to recreate their collaboration on “Lost in the World” and provide some back up on Yeezus‘ “Hold My Liquor.” And of course, there was his much-maligned cover of “Bohemian Rhapsody,” which is in my opinion a bum rap (absolutely no pun intended, I’m better than that). We know dude strains to sing – the point was it was a great move and no doubt an amazing singalong. All that being said, it was by no means a perfect performance. A good way to describe it would be ‘peaks and valleys’…the energy and crowd connection seemed to dip considerably during a number of his lesser known auto-tune heavy ballads, but largely, it was a pretty solid ‘fuck you’ to the petitioners and portion of attendees that booed every mention of Kanye that day.

Easily the greatest thing related to Saturday’s performance, however, was how BBC approached the subtitling. Apparently, the turbo-typer at the helm wasn’t comfortable with profanity or the n-word, because the performance was heavily censored in its textual form. And rather than asterix or blanks, this person got creative with the substitutions.

…until he just threw up his hands in exasperation at the profanity laden perfromance and said ‘Ah, fuck it.’