Kanye West barely performs in headlining set at Rolling Loud

Whatever Kanye West was paid to headline the first night of this weekend’s Rolling Loud California festival, it was easy money. Onstage for about an hour Thursday evening with Ty Dolla Sign — his partner on the chart-topping “Vultures 1” album released last month under the artist name ¥$ — Kanye roamed around in a black jacket and a face mask as their songs played over the festival’s sound system on a huge circular stage planted in the parking lot of Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium. But Kanye’s booking to mark 10 years of Rolling Loud — hip-hop’s festival of record, with wildly popular editions in cities including Miami, New York and Los Angeles — was billed as something different: his first full-scale festival performance since the apparent meltdown of his career after he made a series of antisemitic remarks in late 2022. Instead of the expected performance, Kanye and Ty merely delivered another listening session Thursday, milling around the stage as they played — well, as the sound system played — many of the songs from “Vultures 1.” Guests including Quavo and Freddie Gibbs joined the duo onstage to do the same; at one point, Kanye’s daughter North emerged alongside several of her friends to jump around to “Talking,” a “Vultures” track on which she appears. Salty tweets proliferated among folks apparently watching online — the general idea was that Kanye had pulled off a scam — though those on the ground certainly seemed unbothered: New songs like “Paid,” “Back to Me” and “Keys to My Life” inspired huge reactions in the crowd of tens of thousands, including among one group of people who’d broken through a security fence to climb onto a section of stage scaffolding.