World tour by Kanye West | |
Location |
|
---|---|
Associated album | Yeezus |
Start date | October 19, 2013 | (United States)
End date | September 15, 2014 | (Australia)
Legs | 3 |
No. of shows | 45 |
Supporting acts | |
Box office | $31.8 million[a] |
Kanye West concert chronology |
The Yeezus Tour was the fifth concert tour by American rapper Kanye West, in support of his sixth studio album, Yeezus (2013). Announced with a promotional poster in September 2013, it served as West's first solo concert tour since the Glow in the Dark Tour (2007–08). West shared the opening North American dates that same month and in January 2014, he revealed an additional stint across the continent. The rapper announced legs across Europe and Australia for 2014, although the European dates were cancelled. The tour was intended to combine staging, production, and West's aesthetic to showcase his creativity. Its stage design was handled by Es Devlin, the firm Family, Virgil Abloh, and John McGuire, with Devlin having worked on the likes of mountains and icebergs with West. For the imagery, such as the mountain, West was largely inspired by Alejandro Jodorowsky's cult film, The Holy Mountain (1973). West was accompanied by an opening act from Kendrick Lamar on most of the dates and Pusha T for some of them, while A Tribe Called Quest opened two shows and Travis Scott accompanied Pusha T at one show.
The tour began in Seattle on October 19, 2013, travelling across the United States, as well as to Canada and Australia, until the last show in Brisbane on September 15, 2014. Due to West's equipment becoming damaged after an accident with his tour truck in late October 2013, numerous tour dates in the US were cancelled and others re-scheduled to later dates. West performed the tracks from Yeezus alongside work from his earlier albums and accompanied some tracks with narratives, including delivering stream-of-conscious speeches after "Runaway". The concerts were separated into the five themes of "Fighting", "Rising", "Falling", "Searching", and "Finding", which were introduced with elements from the Bible. West followed different stages of his life in the themes, using masks to represent the personality shifts. The tour made usage of a light show that included a light beam, laser beams, and an LED screen.
The Yeezus Tour received widespread acclaim from critics, who lauded its imagery and generally focused on the mountain. Some critics commended the lighting, while a few reviewers highlighted West's collection of masks. The tour scored the second highest grossing leg of a tour in 2013, only behind Paul McCartney's Out There! Tour. It was the highest-grossing hip-hop tour of 2013, at $31.8 million from 33 shows. The tour was included as the year's most seminal concert in Corbin Reiff's 2017 book, Lighters in the Sky: The All-Time Greatest Concerts, 1960-2016. An accompanying Hype Williams–directed film was teased by West in February 2014, although it was cancelled despite negotiations with IMAX due to his personal issues after Kim Kardashian was robbed in 2016.
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