Image: Getty
King Kanye West hit Manila’s Paradise International Music Festival in the Philippines last night to perform some of his most popular songs. He also performed “Famous” live for the first time, and the crowd went nutso for it. Kanye was suitably moved when they started rapping along with the new track. “You don’t know, it’s really overwhelming for me to perform the song for the first time and for y’all to react to it in that way,” he said.
Famous pic.twitter.com/QVuNoi8dHL
— Paolo Abad (@PaoloJAbad) April 10, 2016
He performed the song twice, and then he spoke from the heart about it: “I wanted you to know, the whole time, you know – in the spirit of Nina Simone, in the spirit of real artists – this is the song that broke the writer’s block to me,” he said.
Kanye's speech about "Famous" 1/1 pic.twitter.com/EcjglXZCuy
— Paolo Abad (@PaoloJAbad) April 10, 2016
“There’s something that I wanted to say so bad, that they told me I couldn’t say. That night, when I went on stage was the beginning of the end of my life. Lady Gaga canceled the tour the next day,” he said about his interruption of Taylor Swift’s award acceptance at the MTV VMAs in 2009.
He went on, via Rappler:
And I had to fight every day of my life when the whole world turned against me for saying out loud what everyone else felt. But that’s the job of an artist – of a true artist – not to be controlled by the finances, not to be controlled by perception, but only to be controlled by their truth – what you see, what you feel, and say what you fucking feel. You know the night I’m talking about, when I just said what everybody else was thinking. So if I get in trouble for saying the truth, what’s being said the rest of the time?
"Say what you f*cking feel" – The Gospel of Yeezus pic.twitter.com/Uy4zWz41Nk
— Paolo Abad (@PaoloJAbad) April 10, 2016
He then asked the crowd if he could perform the song a third time, because Kanye’s gotta Kanye. Don’t worry, the crowd loved it.
