He showed up two hours and 36 minutes late, stood offstage and read a story from the Old Testament for 50 minutes—verbatim with a pentecostal urgency, and all the old, confusing language of thees and thous and hertefores. He occasionally lost his place on the page. Then he took a bow. 

Sitting in the sixth row of one of the most beautiful concert venues in the U.S., I had to laugh. Really, I deserved this. 

I’m the guy who paid for $781 for dream tickets to Kanye West’s opera, Nebuchadnezzar. When you spend that many dollars on tickets to a show by one of the generation’s most electrifying musical talents, the first 200 make sense. The next 581 feel a little judgy. 

I drive a base model CRV. Who did I think I was? 

“Did Kanye just Marcel Duchamp the Hollywood Bowl, put on a giant urinal of an opera to make people question what art is?”

I can explain. Claire and I got married three days before The Purchase. I still hadn’t found the right wedding gift. Sometimes I wish I was the kind of guy who can walk into a jewelry store and say, “I have this much money, give me one of your fancy necklaces that equal that.” Life would be easier, but alas. So sometimes I give the right gift a year after your birthday. Having forgotten the context by that time, people often think the gift is a random act of kindness. Such is the profoundly delayed joy of knowing me. I may or may not still owe a gift to a couple, who may or may not be named Ed and Kellie, whose wedding I attended in 1999. 

Standing outside a Malibu hotel on the third day of our honeymoon—a 1,500-mile road trip through California, to dig deeper into its soul and our own—I got a notification from my concert app, BandsinTown. Kanye West had just announced a last-minute “opera” at the iconic Hollywood Bowl. Kanye makes Claire hyperventilate a little. His new gospel album, Jesus is King, has a lunar grip on her. As luck would have it, we’d be driving home through L.A. the night of the show. 

In his career, Kanye has traversed a wide array of musical genres—hip-hop, spoken word, pop, R&B, rap, rock, pop, electronica, gospel. Most artists who try to crossover fail pretty badly (the White Boy Reggae Effect). Yet Kanye breezily hops back and forth between them, as if changing lanes on an empty highway. Now he’s tackling opera? This could be a groundbreaking, breathtaking hybrid of modern and ancient art forms! 

The classic art of arias and tenors has been playing solo chess in the retirement home for a while now. There’s no opera tent at Coachella. But If a modern zeitgeister like Kanye West truly invested his formidable talent into it? Well, shit. That’s just the shot of B vitamins opera needs! A new generation would find themselves Googling Tosca and Don Giovanni. 

I thought all of this in the minutes it took me to load Ticketmaster on my phone. I had to act. No time to Google what this “opera” would entail. This would sell out fast, wouldn’t it? (The answer, we’d find out later, would be no.) My mind skittered with ideas about what Nebuchadnezzar would look like on stage. I figured Kanye would perform some of his Jesus material, backed by a gospel choir and an opera soloist with fancy costumes and elaborate stage props. Sounded experimental, weird, cool, quintessentially Los Angeles. What a show! A rare, artful spectacle to finish our honeymoon in California’s most spectacled city. This was it. The right gift. Experiences over things. 

I should note here that I’m a formidable cheapskate. But even I knew that nosebleed seats are not a good wedding gift. So I kept scrolling past the reasonable tickets. The numbers got bigger and bigger. I didn’t buy the most expensive seats. I treated it like a wine list, and bought the second-most expensive. Tickets that, come show time, would put us closer to stage than Brad Pitt (what a beautiful man), Kim Kardashian (what a beautiful life form), Val Kilmer (Iceman!), and some older patrons who looked like they owned a couple airplanes. 

Ticketmaster.com tabulated the total cost and asked me to confirm. I felt a little sick. My thumb hovered over the CONFIRM button, shook with the delirium tremens of poor financial decision making. But, honeymoons are the time of fuck-it expenditures, I reasoned. So I percussively hit that button and went to find Claire.

“OK,” I told her. “I got you a wedding gift and I’m not going to tell you what it is but we have to be back in L.A. on Sunday and it’s sixth row tickets to see Kanye!” 

She flipped out. She pogoed, profoundly excited. I was a good husband. 

A few hours later, the media started to uncover a few details of the show. It was a Kanye-produced opera. Kanye was not listed as a performer. “Produced” wasn’t good. Producers don’t often perform. But even the biggest news outlets seemed to have no clue what to expect. Kanye’s camp, and the promoters, weren’t giving many details at all. They seemed to expertly say just-not-enough, and let the desperate imaginations of fans fill in the rest:

He just released a gospel album! This is a gospel opera! A tour is planned! A warm-up show in his hometown of L.A. would make sense! The notices for the concert have Kanye’s face! The choir he’s been performing with will be on stage! His longtime collaborator is directing the performance! No chance he doesn’t perform his new gospel material… right? Right? Please god someone say right. 

I sank into a mild depression that my magical thinking may be incorrect. This may just be a last-minute creative lark, with no Kanye music. There’s not a big market for “last-minute operas,” because opera is no place for whims. We considered selling the tickets. But first, I texted a friend who’s very high up in the hip-hop world. “Do you know if Kanye is going to perform his music, or if it really is just an opera he produced and there’s no Kanye?” He said he didn’t know. He reached out to people close to Kanye. They didn’t know. 

So I texted another person who was actually involved with the show. They said, from their understanding, Kanye was going to perform. But even they seemed unsure. 

Why were the details of the performance so secret? Why did no one from Kanye’s camp, or the promoters, want to tell his fans what they could expect?

Ultimately, we didn’t want to spend part of our honeymoon trying to sell off expensive concert tickets. We decided it was worth the risk. Hold the tickets, kiss the dice, pray for Kanye. 

One woman was crying, raptured by its spirit. One man said this was “fucking bullshit.” 

The night of the concert, we showed up at 3:45PM. The opera was scheduled for 4PM. An usher led us to our seats, and she just… kept… going. We were 20 feet from the lip of the stage, would be able to count nose hairs of performers. The security guard put special wristbands on us, which felt like fancy jewelry. Claire was ecstatic. I started to think this all was worth it. 4PM turned turned into 4:30, which turned into 5PM. Our seats were supposed to have their own waiters, for wine and hot dogs and such. But the Hollywood Bowl was drastically understaffed, explained a nice woman at the concession stand. “Sorry, this was a last minute thing they sprung on us,” she said. 5PM turned into 6PM. Each bathroom break seemed like a gamble to miss the start of the show. And each time you returned and was still pretty far from starting. 

Finally, at 6:30, Kanye appeared on side stage, setting up a lectern behind a partition. Maybe he’d start there, and then emerge and perform! The Sunday Service choir slowly filed on stage—so many of them—in white burlap robes tied with rope. The first music—the choir’s deep, transcendentally spooky harmonies—finally lifted into the picturesquely smoggy L.A. twilight at 6:38PM. The audience held their urge to pee and cheered. 

That’s when Kanye began reading his Old Testament. And just, kept, reading. About 15 minutes into the show, it dawned on me. This was it. This was the plan. He was going to bark the Book of Daniel the whole way. I knew a worst-case scenario like this had been a possibility. I had not been promised a single Kanye song. So lean into the opera, I told myself. Enjoy it for what it is. 

Problem is, Nebuchadnezzar just wasn’t very good. Like not really at all. 

I’ll leave why it failed as an opera to the experts, who repeatedly panned it in national media over the following week. But even for me, as an average opera joe, it was pretty easy to see why. 

It wasn’t lack of talent. The massive Sunday Service choir exchanged dead-beautiful, haunting harmonies. But they weren’t given full songs. More like chants that choirs could learn fairly quickly, like say if Kanye asked them to do a new show next week. Two opera soloists—blessed with inhumanly perfect voices that would make boat captains follow them into sharp rocks—only got a minute or two to mournfully shine. Christian indie band Infinity’s Song sung half of a pretty song or two.

The real problem was Kanye. He constantly interrupted the beautiful half-music by reading aggressively. There was no artful inflection to his voice, no Morgan Freeman drama in it. He didn’t update the language. He didn’t improvise. He didn’t create. He stumbled and lost his place a few times. 

Good opera tells a story through dance and song. But the singers and dancers of Nebuchadnezzar mostly just swayed and stared into the middle distance. I’ve seen more elaborately choreographed flash mobs. There was very little story, aside from Kanye’s live audiobooking of the angry version of the Bible. The costume design peaked at white burlap robes (probably to embody the humble humility of Christian principles, but not terribly fun to look at) and a lead character (rapper Shek Wes) shroud in what appeared to be a camping tarp painted royal purple, with yellow Crocs-like sandals. There only set design was a Last Supper-type feast (which we watched them build backstage before the show, stage hands dumping boxes of Sysco fruits and vegetables and breads onto long planks of plywood) and a sun-faced golden monolith. 

It felt like a bad opera for the same reason the nice woman at the concession stand offered: Nebuchadnezzar was a last-minute thing. 

An optimist would say Kanye truly believed he could give L.A. a great opera, and simply fell short. In that perspective, all but the callous among us would empathize with the man. He gave it a shot, he missed, he’s human. In interviews, he’s explained that he suffers from bipolar disorder, which can both electrify and short-circuit his work. Sometimes people struggling with mental disorders are struck with the intense belief they can pull off the impossible. Like, say, an impromptu opera. Maybe what we saw as delusion, he saw as grandeur. 

A pessimist would say, this is why they kept the details so secret. Someone, somewhere, knew Nebuchadnezzar was undercooked, not ready for consumption. Someone knew Kanye was going to read 56 minutes of old-language scripture offstage. Telling potential ticket-buyers this ahead of time was no way to sell tickets. 

Days later, it would be reported that Kanye gave away 5,000 tickets to fill unsold seats. Maybe that’s why he started so late, waiting for the last-minute recruits to show up so that it would look like a packed house when it was live-streamed on Jay-Z’s service, Tidal. 

Afterward, I watched the fans file out. Their faces were confused, elated, angry, amused, embalmed by defeat, glazed with starstruckness. One woman was crying, raptured by its spirit. One man said this was “fucking bullshit.” Both are becoming predictably common reactions to anything involving Kanye. What he’s not makes him everything he is. 

If Kanye’s point was to get us to think about what art is, then he nailed it. I’ve never heard such a loud rumble of debate after a live performance, the stunned crowd trying to make sense of what they’d witnessed. Did Kanye just Marcel Duchamp the Hollywood Bowl, put on a giant urinal of an opera to make people question what art is? In 1975, Lou Reed convinced RCA executives to put out Metal Machine Music, an entire album of white noise. Apparently enough people thought Reed’s fame and talent were so great that fans would enjoy 64 minutes of hiss and screech. 

After Nebuchadnezzar, Kanye deserves his place among that canon. 

The difference, I guess, is that with Duchamp and Reed’s works, most people knew what they were getting ahead of time. Media and fans had no clue what to expect from Kanye’s opera. The fan who said this was fucking bullshit probably felt he was duped by the show’s intentionally mysterious marketing campaign.. 

What sucks the most is the lost opportunity. Imagine Kanye singing his pretty fantastic new Jesus material alongside the gospel choir and opera soloists! He could have made Madame Butterfly trend on Spotify! Resuscitated an awesome art! Instead, at one point, Shek Wes forgot to fall down. Kanye had to read the part three times (“King Nebuchadnezzar… FELL DOWN!”), trying to make Wes remember his part. It felt like a pretty critical moment in the narrative to forget. Which probably means Wes, like the rest of the talented people onstage, weren’t given enough time to rehearse and nail their roles. 

From our seats, we could see Kanye laugh it off.  

We did get to witness Brad Pitt and Kim Kardashian and Val Kilmer (and learn who Machine Gun Kelly was after watching so many young fans take photos with him). This alone was worth some cost of admission. Seeing truly famous people is a rush, like watching a cartoon character come to life. They have skin and everything. Claire, a lifelong New Yorker and new west coast transplant, got to see the spectacle-soul of Los Angeles. 

Claire is always an optimist, and her glass stayed half full. She loved the gospel choir and the spectacle and the seats and the experience. She loved the risk we took for the chance of seeing great art. What great luck I married a woman like that. 

Sometime very soon, I’ll go shopping for a necklace.