No matter Kanye West was paid to headline the primary night time of this weekend’s Rolling Loud California competition, it was simple cash.Onstage for about an hour Thursday night with Ty Dolla Signal — his companion on the chart-topping “Vultures 1” album launched final month underneath the artist title ¥$ — Kanye roamed round in a black jacket and a face masks as their songs performed over the competition’s sound system on an enormous round stage planted within the car parking zone of Inglewood’s SoFi Stadium.If he was rapping, you couldn’t hear it; if he was holding a microphone, you couldn’t see it.This type of presentation isn’t new for the controversial rapper now often known as Ye, who’s launched his final a number of albums with high-profile listening occasions held in arenas and stadiums across the nation. However Kanye’s reserving to mark 10 years of Rolling Loud — hip-hop’s competition of report, with wildly in style editions in cities together with Miami, New York and Los Angeles — was billed (or no less than was extensively perceived to have been billed) as one thing totally different: his first full-scale competition efficiency for the reason that obvious meltdown of his profession after he made a sequence of antisemitic remarks in late 2022. Kanye West onstage Thursday. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Instances) You bear in mind his claims about Jewish management of Black voices; you’ll recall that on Twitter he vowed to go “loss of life con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE.” The rhetoric price him his relationships together with his report label and his reserving agent and led to the tip of his extremely profitable offers with Adidas, Balenciaga, the Hole and a number of other different main firms. For a minute there, Kanye appeared cooked.But the 46-year-old musician — who apologized for his feedback in December in an Instagram put up written in Hebrew — has been on one thing of a comeback tour of late. “Vultures 1” spent two weeks atop the Billboard 200 final month, changing into Kanye’s first LP to repeat at No. 1 since his and Jay-Z’s “Watch the Throne” in 2011. (He’s mentioned a second quantity of “Vultures” is due quickly.) Much more spectacular, maybe, his single “Carnival” hit No. 1 on the Scorching 100 this week thanks largely to the track’s well being on streaming companies like Spotify, the place it’s racked up greater than 191 million performs.Kanye’s final go to to the highest spot as a lead artist? “Stronger,” means again in 2007.His look at Rolling Loud — set to run by way of Sunday with acts together with Nicki Minaj, Put up Malone and the duo of Future and Metro Boomin — was positioned as the subsequent step in that narrative: a vital alternative to point out he can nonetheless carry it as a stay act.Possibly another time.As an alternative of the anticipated efficiency, Kanye and Ty merely delivered one other listening session Thursday, milling across the stage as they performed — effectively, because the sound system performed — lots of the songs from “Vultures 1.” Friends together with Quavo and Freddie Gibbs joined the duo onstage to do the identical; at one level, Kanye’s daughter North emerged alongside a number of of her associates to leap round to “Speaking,” a “Vultures” observe on which she seems. Followers climb a construction to look at Kanye West carry out Thursday at Rolling Loud. (Wally Skalij/Los Angeles Instances) After all of them left the stage, an unseen DJ performed a couple of half-hour’s price of outdated Kanye classics, together with “Father Stretch My Fingers Pt. 1,” “The entire Lights” and “Runaway,” as a smoke machine did its finest to hide the truth that the rapper wasn’t coming again. (“Vultures 1” has some excessive factors, however listening to these staggering oldies actually made clear how dramatically Ye’s musical expertise have diminished in recent times.)Did followers thoughts? Salty tweets proliferated amongst people apparently watching on-line — the overall thought was that Kanye had pulled off a rip-off — although these on the bottom actually appeared unbothered: New songs like “Paid,” “Again to Me” and “Keys to My Life” impressed enormous reactions within the crowd of tens of hundreds, together with amongst one group of people that’d damaged by way of a safety fence to climb onto a bit of stage scaffolding. Throughout the refrain of “Carnival” the music from the stage lower out and the viewers took over the track’s percussive vocal chant, drowning out the performers within the highlight.However then, after all, that wasn’t exhausting to do.