This article was originally published over on Michael’s blog ‘Roads To The North’, which you can find here.

At the 2015 Brit Awards, Kanye West fully unveiled his anticipated track “All Day”, the latest in a string of Paul McCartney-affiliated cuts after “Only One” and “FourFiveSeconds”. The studio reel places McCartney in its coda, whistling the melody around which Kanye and French Montana’s hammering beat, reminiscent of the industrial influence which characterised the seismic “Yeezus” album and the then-ascendant Chicago drill scene, is based. This portion is excised from the live take, but the way that melodic snapshot is transformed into a sinister, serpentine payload glitching and slicing its way out of the sound system is sheer, intergalactic audio candy. As it is, the (literally) incendiary performance encapsulates such ferocious energy and lightning-in-a-bottle intensity that its later-released studio counterpart is but a pale imitation and strangely forgotten among the living legend’s discography.

When aired as live in the United Kingdom on ITV, the performance was censored to laughable effect as a result of its liberal employment of racial expletives; a skittering, otherworldly broadcast, essentially unwatchable. An uncut, high quality shot in its full splendour was mercifully released into the world later, and it is this which I posit is one of the finest and most revealing musical performances I have ever witnessed. The clip lends the lie aggressively to the fallacy that West is no rapper; his performance is impeccable, evidencing masterful breath control and head-spinning dexterity. From a technical perspective, his lyrical contribution is one of his boldest; packing in syllables to maximum capacity and full of playful, hyperactive internal schemes. I have set sights on this vid so many times that each step of West’s off-the-cuff choreography is cauterised into my memory.

The Brit Awards continues to be held each winter and is the theoretical main event of the UK music industry’s awards season. It has struggled to recapture the much-propagandised hell-raising of its 90s heyday, the zenith of Cool Britannia when such gatherings may well have passed for genuine cultural history. The ceremony is much more sterile now, but that isn’t a word ever likely to be associated with Kanye, even in what is a comparatively minimalist effort like this, in staging if not in themes. Crucial to understanding the vitality of this performance is the fact that the Brits had become associated with the use of a Potemkin crowd of paid-off kids in the style of a latter-day Top of the Pops, also seen annually at the Super Bowl halftime show. These typically include(d) undergraduates of the famed Brit School, a policy famously ridiculed by an inebriated Alex Turner in a memorable 2008 acceptance speech (sadly cut short!). By jettisoning this façade from the set-up in 2015, the ceremony exposed itself in full.

West takes to the stage with a considerably sized crew of London MCs and two flamethrowers. The cameras capture the gulf between the spectacle on stage, the drama, white knuckle thrill and furious glee of heavyweight American hip hop, and the dazed, besuited industry figures below, stalled in their skins, barely a single one of them seen moving when confronted with the bomb-strewn bombast and shrapnel-flicked passion of West at his peak. The gap is physically short, but viewers can see that it constitutes a cultural chasm, calling into severe question the ability of British music bureaucracy to handle an ego and ability of these gigantic proportions. The effect mimics in miniature the real-time informational clashes of art and opinion played out, en masse, on social media after the much-hyped release of West albums like 2013’s “Yeezus” and 2016’s “The Life of Pablo”, big bangs of pop critical theory normalised most notably by the surprise release du jour, Beyoncé’s 2013 self-titled record.

To perplexing perfection, we catch Lionel Richie of all people looking like aliens have landed in front of him, which this is tantamount to for the purposes of apparently everyone in those amassed ranks. Tantalisingly and unforgivably, we cut back to the stage just in time to miss Richie’s reaction to the song’s most provocative deployment (“like a light-skinned slave, boy/we in the motherfuckin’ house!”). Taylor Swift initially appears mesmerised before being seen again later as apparently the only individual in attendance to at least somewhat embrace what they were witnessing. The same cannot be said of Sam Smith, who, in comedic fashion, can be seen partying with a certain restraint later(!). The conclusion is clear; hip hop may have risen to the apex of the pop cultural mountain and West may be one of its most virtuosic purveyors, but the supposed musical elite have little appreciation or feel for it. While this might be cast as a strength for a genre which still thrives upon a burgeoning grassroots pedigree even as it is unfailingly assimilated into the many forms and shapes of capitalism, and which remains typified by the celebration of young black men (and increasingly, though not extensively, women) at their escape from poverty, it also stands as proof that no pyramids have been inverted.

The fact that the ITV broadcast was bludgeoned with the edit button until only identifiable by its dental records did not stop it bearing a magnetic pull for complaints to the UK’s televisual regulator Ofcom. No fewer than 151 armchair dwellers saw fit to complain about the performance, which Ofcom ultimately declined to investigate. Of course, this is by design. West would have known that the fireball he was launching into Britain’s living rooms would deeply unsettle viewers, and this would have been the point. As West appearances at award ceremonies go, this is but another in a lineage of controversial moments defined by rage at the appalling taste of musical societies, their racial bigotry and their whitewashing of musical recognition, but a (albeit barely) more subtle expression of the same sentiment than his previously favoured tactic of stage-storming. The fact that West has the freedom to perform such a neck-jerking track in what has otherwise regressed to a national sonic safe space, to splatter so much blood in this aural operating theatre, is what makes the performance deeply discomfiting for some, and generates the weapons-grade triumphalism enjoyed by West and his disciples when twinned with the revelatory nature of the song’s debut and the scorching showmanship of the flailing furnaces behind him.

Naturally, the real nature of the complaints attracted does not centre around swearing, though that may be a useful proxy. As reflected by the looks of uncertainty and unease in the eyes of the well-heeled live audience, the real objection was to the accumulation of black bodies, a problem in and of itself, but tenfold when occurring in an unexpected vicinity like that stage. The grievousness of the affront, to a certain cross-section, is amplified considerably once again when you consider that the iconography of the Brit ceremony comes cloaked liberally in Union Jacks and that its symbols function as expressions and actualised prizes of a much-coveted well of patriotism. The key to victory in this sphere is to control the levers and thereby be capable of setting the agenda; the reality of the Brit Awards in a contemporary sense seems to lean liberally but often the final judging panel and the viewing public do not (if electoral evidence is anything to go by), but the procurement of Brit Awards, as seen with Dave in 2020 (more on him later), can be a powerful shot across the bows on matters of identity and culture. As such, there is plenty of pageantry involved, certainly more than enough to antagonise some racists.

These clashes are naturally multifaceted; half of the holders of the four Great Offices of State in the UK at the time of writing are of an ethnic minority, but their party, preceding governments of the same party and the Home Secretary herself are all known for illiberal proclamations on immigration. From similar contrasting and counterbalancing forces, Kanye makes it on to the stage with relatively free rein, even in front of a quietly hostile or maybe even shruggingly dismissive live audience which acts as a hologram for a much more vituperative and apoplectic set of viewers at home. The morning after the show, at work, I witnessed Kanye’s appearance written off as nonsense unworthy of a second thought, a perception chafing painfully against the embodiment of hip hop as a commercial and artistic artform, as one of America’s truest dichotomies, that it really represents. If there wasn’t palpable anger, there was a casual disgust with the idea that this could represent a viable artistic pursuit, let alone a globally popular one. It is against this climate that West’s signalling for his assorted guests to “get low”, a suggestion they follow with vigour and enthusiasm as the song clatters through the air raid chimes of its conclusion, becomes almost comical and will likely draw a laugh from any viewer attuned to the veritable canyon of cultural awareness between the performers on stage and the average viewer, both in attendance and otherwise.

One of the complaints about the piece was superbly interpolated into “Shutdown” by Skepta, one of the towering influences of the UK‘s grime scene and one of the artists on stage with Kanye at this very Brits performance, from his history-making, Mercury Prize-winning 2016 album “Konnichiwa”. A woman of almost exaggeratedly middle class enunciation agonises in Home Counties English:

“A bunch of young men, all dressed in black, dancing extremely aggressively on stage; it made me feel so intimidated and it’s just not what I expect to see on prime time TV”.

Here, “dressed in black” is a substitute, whether knowingly or unknowingly; the item the men on stage are wearing which the complainant objects to being black is not a garment, it is their skin. The experience of being publically harassed and targeted for wearing black skin, whether by authorities or otherwise, is far from anything new to black British people, especially the young.

Other young UK acts on stage that night run the gamut from the highly-acclaimed and under-the-radar in the form of Novelist, to the seemingly bulletproof chart-devouring swagger of Stormzy, who has taken grime to commercial heights unthinkable only a handful of years ago. These are but a few of the acts who have pushed London to the forefront of the global hip hop community and made the fever dream that UK rap could ever stand toe to toe with its US counterpart a genuine reality in an impossibly small timeframe. It would be ludicrous to credit Kanye too effusively for this, Drake is a much more celebrated supporter of the scene if we need to throw an active icon into the mixture, but there is no doubt that if his audacity to exist and relentless envelope-pushing in the face of adversity were not enough to inspire, everyone stood on that stage with West certainly got a taste for it. As Kendrick Lamar flowered into a performer who spins exuberant, high-end conceptual plates on stage as much as on record at around the same time, the big guns of British hip hop began to draw on American inspiration for the messaging and narratives of their live spectacles, and the fact that this has been seen most readily at the Brit Awards recently seems no coincidence.

It has since become an unspoken tradition for outstanding British rap stars enjoying a victory lap at the Brit Awards to directly challenge the sitting Prime Minister during performances of notable grandiosity. Although Skepta kept things characteristically no-nonsense in 2017, Stormzy targeted Theresa May in 2018 in a much-stylised set famous for raising the awkward, essential questions regarding the Grenfell Tower disaster of 2017. The aforementioned Dave (also now a Mercury victor) followed in a similar vein earlier this year, calling Boris Johnson a racist to receptions both laudatory and enraged. The ubiquity and quality of black British music at this time, one of the greatest points of pride in a post-Brexit Britain, and part of a wider ongoing golden harvest for British music which I refer to as Hot Britannia, suggests that the Brit Awards stage is likely to remain a pivotal battleground in the Culture Wars in the near future. It is this which, in hindsight, alleviates the criticisms of a very different kind levelled at Kanye by some in the immediate aftermath of the 2015 show; that UK hip hop’s inferiority and subservience to the juggernaut of the US scene was exemplified by the fact that these British MCs were effectively drafted in as West’s backing dancers; mere cosmetic marionettes in what is very much Kanye’s vision. One of the individuals to make this claim was Dizzee Rascal, despite having gone from once winning a Mercury gong of his own in 2003 and blazing an astonishingly individual trail for a generation of acts to come later, to being reduced to novelty singles and toe-curling duds like “Bassline Junkie”, now touring as effectively a nostalgia act.

Even if the proportion of artists present that night to have properly broken through in the years since makes the pace appear glacial, things look very different in 2020. The implication of their presence on the stage, both from the point of view of those who praised Kanye for breaking the barrier down for them and those who criticised him for exploitation, was simple; they would not be invited on to that stage otherwise. Two years later, with Skepta, that had all changed.

Novelist put it this way at the time:

“We were just chilling in Skepta’s house and Kanye rang Skepta and said “yo, can you get some of your guys to come down?” So Skepta just brought his music mates. It was very spontaneous. It was only an hour before the show. I liked the fact that I was onstage with people like myself in my tracksuit; that was sick…

…It all stems from respect from the people. Onstage at the Brits, we were the people’s people, the rebels, and that’s why Twitter and everything was going mental. The TV, the blogs, the big magazines; it doesn’t matter if they say it. The country knows about us, and that’s all that matters”.

This identifies some of the alternative channels which exist as options for narrative-setting, in contrast to the mainstream media, as mentioned earlier.

Grime overlord Wiley had this to say:

“Kanye knows the Brits ain’t letting dons in there like that so he kicked off the door for us”.

This embodies an independent spirit at the heart of the grime scene, one which embraced the chance to go briefly widescreen when it came along. Sometimes revolutions happen quickly, suddenly and without a great amount of planning, even if they do represent the culmination of years or decades of movement. I cannot claim, in an article where I have suggested towards the notion of occurrences and exposures which take place without any party processing their own intentions, that the fact that Novelist and his peers felt that their participation in West’s stunningly theatrical and symbolism-laced jamboree was entirely consensual means that it didn’t have other meanings and reveal other realities; perhaps it simultaneously corporealised a colonial reversal within the Transatlantic rap movement and also represented an insurrectionary moment spearheaded altruistically by a privileged artist with a major statement to make about black opportunity. What Kanye’s performance at the 2015 Brit Awards is, either way, is a super-sized serving of musique vérité; lifting the veil on a preponderance of musical, cultural, racial and societal truths in explosive form, and therefore one of the greatest live performances ever committed to tape.