Yeezy Season 3/TLOP Premier

On Thursday, February 11th, Hussein and I rushed out of school to go to Tyson’s AMC to see the premier of “The Life of Pablo”, as well as the unveiling of Kanye West’s new Yeezy clothing line.

Upon arrival, we were directed to the IMAX theatre in Tyson’s, and waited in line to have the online tickets we printed out be checked. As we walked in, we were welcomed to a black screen accompanied by the trademark “Yeezy Season 3” font title, occasionally switching to “The Show Will Begin Soon” in the same font.

This remained on the screen for a good 15 minutes, before cutting to a livestream of a fully packed Madison Square Garden. The Garden was set up with angelic blue spotlights, peering over multiple large tarps where the models were preparing for the show to begin.

As the Kardashian family first made their entrance into the Garden, the crowd went crazy. Soon after, Kanye appeared, accompanied by the likes of Travis Scott and Metro Boomin. He then proceeded to connect the fabled laptop from “Real Friends” and “No More Parties in LA” to the aux, and the fun began.

Kanye played the first track of “The Life of Pablo”, “Ultralight Beam”. The viewers in the theatre, including myself and Hussein, took very well to this song and it became clear immediately that the theme of this album was happiness and redemption.

The second song had two parts, “Father Stretch My Hand pt. 1” and “Pt. 2”. The first part began with the classic “If Young Metro don’t trust you, I’m gonna shoot you” tagline, and immediately cut to Kid Cudi singing “Beautiful morning, you’re the sun to my morning babe”. This song was taken extremely well.

“Pt. 2” was a very rapid verse about Kanye’s father, and the struggles he had such as “all his cash, market crash” and “people get divorced for that”. While an entertaining and fast paced song with Panda by new GOOD Music signee Desiigner playing in the background, it is clear this song comes from a certain place in Kanye’s heart.

The next song, “Famous”, was the most controversial. Starting off with a line about how Kanye made Taylor Swift famous and how she owes him sex, this was met with a lot of members of the crowd going “Whoaaaaahhhh”.

During these tracks, cameras panned through many of Kanye’s garments. Young Thug could be seen modeling, and new colorways for the popular Yeezy 350 were shown, as well as the unveiling of the new Yeezy 1050 boots, a sort of update to the clunky 950 boots.

After Famous, the song Feedback was played. The song is a rap through and through, with no chorus and a very hard beat. The highlight of this song was Kanye’s line “Hands up, hands up, then the cops shot us”, which was met with a lot of cheering and excitement from the crowd.

Kanye then played the song Highlights, a very cheerful song which provoked the crowd to sing along. Immediately after this track, Kanye plays the eery and nightmarish “Freestyle 4”, which seems to characterize the dark and illicit activities that accompany fame. The audience went dead silent at the arrival of this track.

After “Freestyle 4”, Kanye played the masterpiece I had been waiting for since it was premiered in a low quality form at the first Yeezy Season in early 2015: Wolves. The crowd immediately reacted with excitement at the reintroduction of the song. I noticed the song had been changed, removing Vic Mensa and Sia’s solo parts from the song, and replacing them with a Kanye verse about protecting his children from the “Wolves”.
After Kanye’s verse, the unthinkable happened. The extremely private Frank Ocean made his legendary return with a beautiful verse at the end of Wolves, after a two year hiatus from music. This took the audience completely aback, and I heard numerous voices exclaiming “Frank Ocean! He’s back! Frank is back!” all at once. As Frank Ocean’s solo played, I was certain I made a good choice in attending the premier.