Kanye West was welcomed back to Los Angeles during his blockbuster comeback show, with no apologies

Kanye West was on top of the world on Wednesday night, or at least that’s the image the controversial rapper projected at his comeback show at SoFi Stadium, where he spent the entire night atop a dome lit by a projection of the Earth rotating beneath him.

It’s a stark metaphor for a man who not even a full year ago released “Heil Hitler” — one of the most anti-Semitic songs ever recorded by a major artist — just months after a Super Bowl ad was used to direct viewers to a website to plaster T-shirts emblazoned with swastikas. However, it’s hard to completely dismiss that assertion as nonsense, for a year later, on the first night of Easter, he was at one of the country’s largest and finest concert venues, enjoying it amidst a heavily streamed new album release while a sold-out crowd of tens of thousands of people erupted in screaming cheers when his show began.

West’s years-long wave of hate speech has steered his career in a direction that few thought could lead to a major platform again, but Wednesday certainly made the idea that he was facing actual cancellation seem far-fetched. Gamma, the independent music label whose roster includes Usher, Mariah Carey and Snoop Dogg, has chosen to partner with West on Bully. The album is likely to debut in the top five on Billboard’s 200 Albums chart next week. Clearly there are still stadiums in this country that will book him, as well as fans to fill their seats.

As for the fans themselves, many of them have spoken out Hollywood Reporter On set before the show he seemed ready for the West to enter a new era, saying so Bully The closest they felt was that West was the “old Kanye” in years. Meanwhile, the controversies surrounding West are nothing new, nor have long-time fans encountered them before. The consensus among some who spoke was mainly that they tolerated the separation of art from the artist.

“We know his medical history and the reason he’s talking so loudly, he talks about being bipolar,” 32-year-old Chris Gutierrez said before the show began. “We come here more to appreciate the music.”

Gutierrez says many people he knows have stopped listening to the West amid the controversy in recent years, which he understands. “It’s difficult, I understand that. I come from a psychological background. I don’t know if it’s clear enough or not. But we’re here more for the music.”

“I mean, he’s a musical genius,” replied Max, Gutierrez’s friend, who asked that only his first name be used.

Ingrid Sandoval, 32, said she is a behavioral specialist who works with people with autism, and after West said in an interview that he had been diagnosed with autism, she became more sympathetic to his behavior. When asked if she had any hesitations about buying tickets when they go on sale, she said: “I feel like it’s OK now, but I would say if I had done this a year ago, I would probably have been judged more.”

While West apologized for his anti-Semitic allegations earlier this year in an announcement on… wall Street Journal, He did not address the controversy further in his most public appearance since then, and barely addressed the public at all on Wednesday.

In typical Kanye fashion, the show began two hours later than the advertised time at 7pm, and the show began at 9pm when the dome was unveiled. The show itself was not entirely polished, as West directed the show’s crew several times during the set to change the visuals, leading him to launch into several songs. Early on, he asked the lighting team to “make the ground move slower.” In the latter half of the night, while performing “Good Life,” he twice began giving real-time feedback to change the lights, which he thought was “tacky.”

“Is this SNL “Skeet,” West quipped into the microphone. “Stop shaking the Vegas lights.”

His live vocals were a bit muddy at times as well, making it difficult to differentiate during some songs when he was performing versus when it was just recorded vocals from the backing tracks.

However, none of that bothered the audience, especially when West showed off his deeper back catalog of rap classics. West started the night off with a little Bully tracks, but the crowd didn’t fully explode until the first “la la las” of “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” started playing.

Don Toliver came out with West to perform Donda “Moon” as well as her own song “E85”. West’s daughter, 12-year-old North West, also made a surprise appearance to perform a couple of songs with her father as well.

Wednesday’s setlist also includes the Jay-Z collaborations “N**as in Paris” and “Mercy,” and Yeezus’ songs “Black Skinhead” and “Bound 2.” Eagles Track “Carnival”. West closed out the night with a medley of his old hits, including “All Falls Down,” “Jesus Walks” and “Through the Wire.”

West closed out the night with “Runaway,” one of his most beautiful and introspective songs. It was a surprising choice for the end of the book given its self-awareness and vulnerability, as West acknowledges some of his own flaws and mistakes. It’s hard to know whether he’d be able to write songs like that again today, but for the fans at SoFi on Wednesday night, that didn’t seem to matter as much as the reminder that he wrote those songs in the first place.