So prevalent is the sport of hating Kanye West that it’s hard to tell whether the pockets of kids wandering around the concrete sprawl of LA’s FYF Fest sporting “Fuck Kanye” T-shirts are making some kind of statement, or simply just out and about. Up until two days ago, the festival’s Saturday-night headline slot belonged to Frank Ocean, in theory making his grand return following what has felt like decades making the follow-up to 2012’s Channel Orange. Instead he pulled out, citing a “scheduling conflict”, while the festival’s statement solemnly read: “Frank Ocean has decided on his own terms to cancel his appearance.” Enter Kanye West to save the day. Or, if those T-shirts were anything to go by, to do what he does best: piss off a lot of people.
Situated in downtown LA and sandwiched between two museums, an indoor sports arena and the gargantuan Memorial Coliseum stadium (the site of the 1932 Olympic Games), FYF Fest – now in its 11th year – may lack the breathtaking vistas of some of Europe’s best festivals, but there’s something endearing about its strange jumble of identities.
Peppered around the site of previous Olympic victories, for example, are big inflatable emojis, including one large smiling pile of poo, while the official merchandise stand is neighboured by a massive origami stall selling paper giraffes. Elsewhere, huge groups of people stand around waiting for their phones to charge at designated social media-enabling spots, while daylight karaoke blasts out behind them.
Thankfully, the organisers also laid on some music, countering the oppressive afternoon heat with Saturday’s run of dreamy jangle pop. Toronto’s Alvvays open the main stage with aplomb, while Tennis’s sun-dappled yacht-rock mixes perfectly with the fug of weed smoke that drifts over the second stage. But it’s the soft psych storm caused by Melody’s Echo Chamber that perfectly frames the afternoon, frontwoman Melody Prochet semi-apologising after one particular sonic experiment with the simple, “We’re French.”
Hazy, blissed-out guitar music only really works in the sunshine, and it’s after dark that things get really interesting. Savages – debuting new songs that sound as taut and as precise as their old ones – prowl around looking like they’re about to start a fight. A surprisingly muscular-sounding Bloc Party, with two new members, chuck a handful of fresh songs in with the old (Banquet, in particular, still sounds amazing). Striding on to the main stage to Queen’s We Are the Champions in front of a huge crowd, Run the Jewels and their brand of playfully aggressive, forward-thinking hip-hop almost threaten to steal festival understudy Kanye’s crown.
While West’s staging is the same as at Glastonbury – just him, prowling around underneath a constantly moving bank of spotlights – the feel is completely different. Away from the pressures and buildup of that headline slot, he seems genuinely relaxed, almost playful. Opening with No Church in the Wild – featuring a nod to Frank Ocean – he lurches into the back-to-back assault of Power and Black Skinhead, the latter stopped and restarted so the lighting rig can be moved up to avoid any accidents. He now seems to be in his comfort zone when creating aggressive punk-rap such as All Day, but he’s not afraid to play the crowd-pleasers. The plaintive Runaway is stopped early so he can knock out seven hits in seven minutes (“I’ve got 10 years’ of motherfucking hits to do,” he shouts, checking on the time). One of those hits is Four Five Seconds, January’s campfire singalong featuring Paul McCartney and Rihanna. While McCartney is absent from proceedings, a slightly bemused Rihanna is suddenly thrust into the spotlight when a smiling Kanye sits on the edge of the stage and hands her the microphone. Later, he drags her up to help out on All of the Lights, Rihanna ending her impromptu guest appearance by chucking the mic down and disappearing back into the smoke.
While anti-Kanye fashions dominated Saturday, Sunday’s sartorial spotlight belongs to slacker pinup Mac DeMarco, whose battered thrift-store chic is replicated everywhere you look. While his songs lumber around sweetly, nestling somewhere between Pavement and early Lemonheads, they seem to have a strange effect on the vast crowd. At one point, a woman, dodging flying bottles, crowdsurfs towards the front of the stage and promptly lifts up her top, causing DeMarco to blush like a teenage boy. Later on the same stage, a playful Solange also relieves herself of her bra – “I got to free the nipple” – seemingly trying to do anything to forget the technical issues that mean she is on half an hour late and is constantly wrestling with her monitors. (“After this stressful ass show, I’m getting so fucked up,” is her closing comment.) Drawing mainly from 2012’s True EP, there’s time for her low-slung version of Dirty Projectors’ Stillness Is the Move, a spine-tingling and prescient cover of Nina Simone’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, featuring Dev Hynes and Moses Sumney, and two densely layered new songs that suggest a move away from the immediate rush of Lovers in the Parking Lot and the crowd-pleasing, never-not-amazing Losing You.
Crowd-pleasing is pretty high up on D’Angelo’s list of priorities these days, too. Showcasing last year’s surprise Black Messiah album, he struts and glides around the stage like a man reborn, thrashing his diamond-encrusted guitar around while his immaculate band flit between extended jam sessions and concise moments like the lovely Betray My Heart. Closing on the main stage, perpetual grump Morrissey is in no mood to placate anyone. “Los Angeles: it’s you, me and a stick of butter,” he bellows before lurching into ragged opener The Queen Is Dead, a doctored image of the Queen sticking two fingers up emblazoned behind him. Meanwhile, for Ganglord, graphic images of police brutality are flashed up on the screen, Morrissey near-snarling his way through a set that sometimes feels more thrilling when the songs stop and you wonder if he might say something controversial. In the end, though, another festival’s controversial moment centred around Kanye West, only this time he unequivocally pulled it off.
