‘Saturday Night Live’ music: Kanye West performs ‘High Lights,’ ‘Ultra Light Beams’
There’s always a lot of buzz surrounding an appearance from Kanye West on “Saturday Night Live,” mostly because we get the sense that he puts a whole lot of effort into everything that he does, in between the performance of his music to also his creative expression. We question what he says and does sometimes, but we’ve never questioned some of his considerable talent.
With that said, why didn’t we enjoy his performance of “High Lights” on this weekend’s episode of Melissa McCarthy more than we did? Ultimately, we have to blame some of this on the sole fact that we didn’t understand what was going on the majority of the time. First and foremost, there was a really lengthy introduction before we even got to him singing, and while “808s and Heartbreak” is probably one of our favorite albums, we miss the days of him doing more straight-up rap. The lyrics were also hard to understand thanks to the auto-tune.
Also, it was interesting how terribly some of the censors here were. We were watching the Canadian broadcast and cannot really comment on if the NBC one was the same, but we heard multiple usages of several words that are not typically allowed on any primetime show.
“High Lights” is one of the tracks off of Kanye’s new album “The Life of Pablo.” We think there’s probably some strong content here, but for the sake of “SNL” there really was not much of a melody.
Update: The second song entitled “Ultra Light Beams” was much more successful for the most part, since it really delivered on the emotion of the lyrics and also the collaboration between West and his fellow artists. Interestingly, recent “SNL” guest Chance the Rapper really stole the show.
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