Try as you might, you simply cannot see or hear Kanye West’s closing performance at the Billboard Music Awards last night—at least not with any clarity or consistency.
Yes, Kanye, we get that hiding in a slather of sherbet backlight and sparkle spray fits in with your recent smokey, masked stage performances (which we like). And sure, ABC, we know you had to dump the audio out of the unedited “All Day” and “Black Skinhead” (them lyrics are rough). But you are a group of highly paid professionals who should have known that a stage full of smoke might work in person, but just doesn’t translate to 2D viewing. And it was totally predictable that keeping in all those R-rated lyrics would have meant that people at home would get as much silence as music. Kanye, if you were trying to prove a point about how uncompromising you are about your art, you did so by depriving us of what could have been a great performance.
