Originally published last night, but moved up because we wanted to.

• All Images Suzi Pratt

Y'know, maybe I'm just an asshole. Before last night, I couldn't get over my initial gut reaction to WTT, but it was just the context of all that's going on in the world that made that album's hype taste like shit in my mouth. OK, so maybe Watch the Throne isn't the soul-bereft masterstroke of Illuminati pop mind-control that I thought it was—maybe it’s a bleak, gothy opera, their attempt at scripting the impending doom that it feels like the world is facing today. (Hey, remember to smile!) Maybe they were just trying to show us what it's like "in this white man's world" when they're "the ones chosen." As a longtime stan for both of these guys that entered the Dome with a heavy load of skepticism about their current trajectory, I'm not afraid to admit that my faith was renewed. I think the best possible context to understand their latest album was 50 feet away from their over(and over and over and over)blown spectacle.

We got there early, so we sat for a while in our seats, which were almost alarmingly close (thanks, Ashley Graham of Live Nation, and whoever bailed on writing about this show). Ten feet from us, lighting guys took their battle stations on a piece of scaffolding and were hoisted up to the rafters. After a nice long mix of soul songs sampled for semi-obscure rap tracks (what a charming old chestnut), the lights went out, the screens went on, and Kanye West bounded down the ramp/ziggurat like he was going to slay a fucking lion.

Mr. Fashion Forward wore exactly the outfit that you might’ve heard about: leather kilt, leather leggings, which is a pretty contemporary look, really. What fucked his fit up, though, was the tall shitty concert tee—like a 2-for-5 Foot Looker tall tee, that would've gone great with Platinum FUBU jeans and a Black & Mild. It was just tall enough that you couldn’t quite tell if he was sporting the world's most baller Utilikilt, as if he was head of security at ConWorks back in the day.

Yeezy launched right into into the Lex Luger-produced "H.A.M.," a tune, like all of WTT, that couldn't be more appropriate anywhere other than in a stadium. That's when I realized Jay-Z was behind me, hyping Ye's lines from another stage. The floor-level audience were all standing on the padded metal folding chairs, balancing gingerly, it was a little harrowing to keep balance on my deadening legs (they rapped for two-and-a-half hours, bruh) and turn this way or that to see the performances, but it was worth it. The two stages rose up like the Decepticons headquarters and I just had to laugh. What. The. Throne.

Jay joined Yeezy onstage, and the pair ripped through what seemed like half of the album, before they flew off into solo sets of varying intensities. They were surprisingly bare-bones aside from all the craziness, just dudes with microphones rapping really well, a DJ (Million Dollar Maino), a keyboard player (Mike Dean), and a guitarist (no idea) silhouetted in the rear, never making their presence obvious.

You might've heard Kanye kicked some people out, for throwing business cards out, and Matson On Music, who I was rolling with, got some great video of the incident. (It was the most anti-rap-grinder moment possibly to ever occur in the Northwest, and I'm glad I got to witness it. Kanye was a diva there, but guys like that are all douchebags.) The suddenly stern leather-skirted gestapo rapper asked a subordinate named Drew to kick them all out, unless somebody raised their hand and admitted that they threw said filthy promo materials under the virgin soles of his Yeezy IIs (See, now I have to figure out how to get a pair of those, since my 1s are now antiquated.) The song immediately after the incident was "Diamonds Of Sierra Leone," and Yeezy, perhaps still seething, fucked up his lyrics, which prompted Jay to do the same. That was the only misstep that whole night, aside from the over-friendly flail-dancing stockbroker-looking dude in front of me who fell spectacularly backwards off of his chair.

Anyway, back to clothes: at one point Kanye popped up on the southernmost cube, wearing what looked like a bejeweled, zippered sorta-grunge-flannel tied around his waist (almost a bolder move than the skirt) while he performed some of his most bummer songs, including 808s & Heartbreaks stuff complete with Auto-Tune mic and “Stronger” (which for whatever reason I just have never liked). Hova was all black everything of course, topped with an all-black snakeskin-billed Yankee New Era, adjustable with a gold buckle. His heavy rap-talismanic necklaces, like Kanye's bracelets were most theatrical, whether tucked under a shirt, out, swinging, refracting lasers, telegraphing a shift of the shoulders or illuminating the smallest hand gestures. “Bill Gates don’t dangle diamonds in the face of peasants,” as Andre 3000 once said of our hometown hero—but those motherfuckers sure as hell do.

Jay did his first Kanye-produced hit, "H To The Izzo," but first let the OG "I Want You Back" play; I thought of my uncle, and was shuddered for the millionth time at the thought of the massive connection that music provides. After Hova ran through "Big Pimpin," Kanye drawled, "I was on my couch, watching this guy on the TV, like "Big Pimpin, spendin' cheese", imitating Jay. "Now I'm onstage with my idol...so don't let nobody tell you what you can't do!" Truly inspirational, though, was their sittin'-on-the-stoop rendition of the RZA-produced "New Day," the lowest-energy performance of the night, but the most soulful and naked. Those human moments, acted out, really connected me to the struggle they express on WTT. They might in fact be the 1%, but they're almost willing to crucify themselves, Tupac-style, for the people to perhaps better understand what's at stake.

They know what they're dong. Whether they are really immanentizing the eschaton, they, like so many others in pop music, willfully trade in symbols that are well cataloged and dissected on sites like Vigilant Citizen here, here, here, here, here, or here, for crissakes. If you're not a nut like me, and don't believe that stuff like that impacts mass consciousness, then disregard; but it was fun to imagine that Kanye's in-ear monitors, with wires curling back from his ears, were there to invoke Baphomet—or that Jay was getting his Crowley on during the black-silhouette performance of "On To The Next One".

Jay and Kanye are two of the shrewdest guys to ever come from this hiphop shit; they get it, they know the power in these symbols. When they juxtapose disturbing film stock of a bright-eyed Klansbaby with smiling Klanswomen, with Baptists in the river, catching the spirit, they are being extremely deliberate. There's no reason to think they aren't being just as deliberate when they gleefully wrap themselves in the occult. (Pretty fucking metal!)

The Throne was exactly what I expected: the ultimate in technological military-industrial laser-guided global dominance rap, the American flag huge with flames shooting in front of it, F-15s flying, the whole nine. And it was also the cultish, Luciferian rite I envisioned, them hypnotizing us with repetition ("Niggas In Paris" five times, fam), cavorting god-like in front of a huge lightning-and-clouds projection, with nearly every hand in the crowd holding aloft the pyramid "diamond" that used to signify the Roc (but now seems to be about something else). What I didn't expect was to go so gaga for it; but I was surely ensnared by their high-tech mind control, obviously.

All images by Suzi Pratt!