Forget headlining festivals or holding impromptu album previews in arenas, the apparent next level of musical endeavors for Kanye West is staging a biblical opera at the Hollywood Bowl.
On Sunday afternoon, West tweeted a photo of a golden invite to Nebuchadnezzar, “a Kanye West opera” directed by performance artist Vanessa Beecroft, with music from West’s gospel series Sunday Service, Peter Colins and Infinities Song.
Invite artwork by Nick Knight pic.twitter.com/U7IBqe1Gxk
— ye (@kanyewest) November 17, 2019
Maybe, like us, you were too distracted by the portrait of the longest-reigning monarch of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (thanks, Wikipedia) to notice a very important detail at the bottom of the invite: This isn’t just some pipe dream, but an actual, seriously-going-to-happen event slated for this Sunday, November 24 at the Hollywood Bowl.
Unlike West’s typically invite-only Sunday Service shows, though, you can actually buy tickets for this one. The Hollywood Bowl itself confirmed the news via Twitter, saying that tickets will go on sale today, November 24, at noon. In addition, a presale is set to start at 10am. No ticket prices were immediately available.
This isn’t the first time West has announced a last-minute show at the Bowl; in 2015, he tackled 808s & Heartbreak with only a couple of weeks notice. But if you haven’t tuned into the Kanye-verse in a while, you might be left scratching your head at this particular show. The same guy who rapped “Gold Digger” created an opera about a Neo-Babylonian king who conquered the Iron Age kingdom of Judah? (Again, shoutout to Wikipedia.) Well, as Pitchfork points out, West, during a recent interview about his new gospel album Jesus is King, compared his godlike attitude on the Yeezus tour to the ancient monarch. “I stood on the top of the mountain talking about Yeezus, saying, ‘I’m a God’—I had a guy dressed as Jesus,” West said in a Beats 1 interview. We sure can’t wait to see the staging for Nebuchadnezzar.