Twenty years after his debut album, The College Dropout, controversial rap star Kanye West released Vultures 1 on February 10, 2024, in collaboration with fellow American rapper Ty Dolla Sign. He then announced the listening party that was to be held at the Accor Arena in Paris on Sunday. Fans who had paid between €90 and €200 per ticket believed the immersive musical experience promised by the venue was a ripoff.

After an hour's wait with all the lights switched off and fans singing the PSG fight song "Ici, c'est Paris!" ("This is Paris!") or the protesting farmers' slogan "Macron démission" ("Macron resign"), the audience was treated to a full high fidelity playback of Vultures 1. But neither Kanye West nor Ty Dolla Sign, both wearing masks, deigned to pick up a microphone to rap or even say a word, not even a "hello" or "good night." They mimed their lyrics, tried out a few dance steps and entered and existed in a central halo of light under a screen projecting their gesticulations. On the last song, "King," West simply removed his mask, merely providing confirmation it was indeed him who had been dancing for an hour.

West is no longer 2004's ambitious and enthusiastic Chicago beatmaker who penned most of the music for Jay-Z's Blueprint (2001) and Scarface's The Fix (2002) albums. His younger self displayed brilliance and challenged the status quo at the MTV Music Videos, for instance criticizing Taylor Swift winning over Beyoncé. He ingeniously sped up soul samples, introduced a gospel choir into his track "Jesus Walks" and collaborated closely in the studio with a dozen other artists so that each album could drop new freshness on the hip-hop universe.

In 2008, he added autotune to his repertoire and delved into emotional themes with 808s & Heartbreak. The son of an English literature professor from Chicago and a former Black Panther member who was a photographer from Atlanta, West readily fired criticism, for example at a US president too slow to come to the aid of Hurricane Katrina's Black victims. "George Bush doesn't care about Black people!" he declared in 2005.

The young West, routinely praised and always ready to get carried away, has nothing in common with the increasingly twisted man who now calls himself Ye, prone to overt anti-Semitism as well as racist provocations toward his own community. In 2018, he unhesitatingly asserted that slavery was a choice and in 2022 wore the US white supremacists White Lives Matter t-shirt as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement that denounced police violence against Blacks.

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