6.29.15 Adam headed to AU, radio charts up, FAULT COVER!

But not all concert experiences are about musicality, and not all performances are about the singing. Kanye is a rapper, not a singer, and it's generally acknowledged that the only thing that allows him to experiment beyond rapping in his music is autotune, which he uses brilliantly and innovatively. Sometimes, a moment is more about the crowd (which was happily singing along to BR and cheering enthusiastically) than about the performer. And to me, watching the brief clip in that Kanye/Adam BR mashup posted above (which is all I've seen of Kanye's performance), there was something really new to me about Kanye's take, that revealed a song I've heard hundreds and hundreds of times in a new, and moving, and kind of heartbreaking light: to see an African American man singing those tragic opening lyrics, given current situation in America, and the poverty-race intersection, and the violence and the fear, and the awful gun situation in this country, and the poisonous political climate, and the giant immoral racist shit-storm (pardon me) that is our criminal justice system. I'm pretty sure those screen-caps posted yesterday of BBC close-captioners giving up and typing in scornful comments instead on Kanye's Glasto performance were photo-shopped--I hope they were (and thought they were funny)--because if they were real that would have been shockingly disrespectful, and those people should have been fired. I can't imagine they'd ever do it to a white artist. And I can't help feeling (though I know this will really bring on the stones! and I want to be clear I'm not talking about Adam here at all) that though he brings a lot on himself, a lot of the grief Kanye gets is inextricably wrapped up in systematic, and often subconscious, racial prejudice.