Kanye West fans enraged after Sacramento concert is cut short

Kanye+West+fans+enraged+after+Sacramento+concert+is+cut+short

“Get ready to have a field day, press. Get ready, get ready. Because the show’s over.”

And with that, Kanye West dropped his mic, storming to the back of his floating stage as his thousands of fans looked up at him in shock and disbelief.

On Saturday, Kanye West infamously made his Sacramento fans wait one hour and 24 minutes, for him to arrive to perform a few disjointed songs, rant for over fifteen minutes about a jumble of very loosely related topics and cancel the show.

For the second time in a row. The first time was at the SAP center in San Jose, where West ranted about Trump for 40 minutes while fans threw various articles of clothing at him on the stage. (UPDATE: West hospitalized.) 

“We’ve lost all respect for him,” Maddy Damos, a Granite Bay High School senior, said. “For someone who is so well known to waste the money of hundreds of people two concerts in a row is just horrible…He isn’t a reliable artist.”

Many GBHS students went to the concert hardly expecting the senseless drivel Kanye West spouted onstage, and griped on social media about the surprise cancellation.

“F*** Kanye West,” Emma Hansen, a GBHS senior, said in a video posted on Instagram.

Before it all crashed and burned, however, all was good in the Yeezus universe.

Concertgoers were initially more than a little excited.

“I had known about it for two months,” Faith Glover, a GBHS sophomore, said. “(My friend and I) got ready together.”

They joined the cluster of cars with license plates from as far away as Nevada packing nearby streets. A traffic officer told people waiting at street corners that the street was blocked off for Kanye’s concert so they could walk straight across, no problem. Kardashian lookalikes marched to the Golden 1 center in hordes, clutching their arms in the frigid air and chatting about how much warmer it would be inside. Once inside, the line just to get inside the merchandise store snaked its way around lines to food booths over halfway around the entire stadium, about six people thick and densely packed.

However, as 9, the time at which the concert was supposed to start, came and passed, concertgoers started to get fidgety.

“We were just sitting there with no music at all, just waiting an hour until he came out,” Anna Healy, a GBHS sophomore, said. “(At that point) we just kind of thought it wasn’t very cool anymore.”

Still, when the lights finally went down and music started coming on, fans suddenly seemed to forget that fact. The aisles were flooded with people as fans fumbled their way in dim lighting to find their seats.

The concert began phenomenally. Kid Cudi came out with Kanye West to perform “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” and everybody was dancing desperately in their seats in an orgasma of orange and red light.

“All of the people in the pit were having a great time,” Glover said. “The platform he was on was moving!”

Even toward the end of the first song, however, things started getting weird: Kanye broke down on stage.

“They (Cudi and West) were just hugging for a good two minutes when the song was playing over the speakers, and then he let Cudi off the stage to continue on with the show,” Glover said.

They went backstage and “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” played on loop as Cudi got off and Kanye collected himself.

After another reiteration of “Father Stretch My Hands Pt. 1” as well as a few more songs, Kanye West stopped abruptly a quarter into “Famous.”

And then he started talking.

In grainy footage of that night, Kanye is seen to almost seamlessly, casually transition from singing the chorus of “Famous” to doing something very different.

“Stop it, stop it. Hey radio, f*** you! Radio f*** you!” West screeches at the top of his lungs. His voice is further amplified by the deafening speakers placed throughout the stadium, and the overall effect is intimidating. “Y’all don’t want to lose again. A lot of people here tonight felt like they lost. You know why? Because y’all been lied to.”

For a good fifteen minutes, West raved passionately, his intensity never letting up the whole while, as he strided back and forth on the small floating stage, his audience disapproving wildly.

“At one point someone threw their hat at Kanye and he (leaned) over the stage and yelled at the guy and said not to throw things at him while he’s talking,” Damos said.

Kanye touched on a variety of subjects ranging from the new president elect Donald Trump to Beyonce to Mark Zuckerberg to Google to his hatred for radio and MTV, all the while saying over and over again about how great the artists of our time were and how he wasn’t specifically docking them, he was docking what they were representing.

“While he was talking, he’d yell at the crowd to agree with him,” Damos said. “Then he said we all need to, like, be ourselves or something stupid like that and said to prove a point he’s ending the concert now (30 minutes in) and walked off stage.”

Yeezy fans were floored. Most didn’t believe it until the lights came on a few minutes later.

“I was so upset!” Glover said. “Everybody was kind of just standing there. We were like ‘oh my god, is this serious, do we have to go now?’”

“He’s a great performer and everything, but he was like ‘my job is to send this message’ but it was like no, you’re here to perform for us not to perform this.” Healy said.

“Everyone was very angry, and as we were leaving people who hadn’t even gone inside left cursing,” Damos said. “One kicked over a trash can.”

A few people tried to start “F*** Yeezy” and “F*** Kanye” chants, but they all faded out as people talked with neighboring seatmates in disbelief, wondering about refunds and trying to process what had just happened.

GBHS students are significantly more nonchalant than most concertgoers about what had occurred.

“I mean, I’m personally more upset he didn’t sing my favorite song, but like we aren’t kick-over-trash-can mad, more like lightly-kick-it mad,” Damos said.

Videos of the event have gone viral on social media. One such video taken by a GBHS student has had over 5,000 views on it at the time this article was written, just 14 hours after it had been published.

Students who posted videos of the event on social media were also contacted by media professionals for use in articles. This Gazette writer was contacted by Donie O’Sullivan, a producer for CNN, for use of the video she took of Kanye’s rant on CNN and affiliate websites.

Overall, GBHS students have one resounding sentiment when it comes to the Sacramento installment of the Saint Pablo tour.

“Worst concert ever,” Glover said.