It’s been roughly 50 years since Saturday Night LIve first brought its counter-culture charms to weekend TV, and the vast majority of the NBC staple’s lofty highs, abysmal lows, and most infamous moments have been explored through several behind-the-scenes specials and documentaries. And it’s hardly a surprise that one of SNL’s more memorable musical guests, Kanye West, took the spotlight for part of Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music, which is currently streaming with a Peacock subscription.
One of many SNL musical guests with multiple appearances (even if he probably won't land any upcoming guest host spots in the near future), West took the Studio 8H stage across seven episodes in total from 2005-2018, The rapper's final, rabble-rousing performance (which followed his notorious 2016 on-set meldown) was tackled late in the doc, and someone who was rather quickly in over her head during that episode was new recruit Ego Nwodim, who shared:
This is the thing about Saturday Night Live. It’s really live. . . .You could go rogue, and some people do. . . . First episode, I’d moved to New York exactly eight days prior for this job. [Laughs.] I just remember at air, I was like, 'Okay, this is gonna be my first good nights.'
The episode, hosted by BlacKkKlansman star Adam Driver, was already destined to be something out of the ordinary when Kanye West appeared in promo ads with Driver and longest-running cast member Kenan Thompson while wearing a red Make America Great Again cap. (BTS footage from the promo taping, in which Thompson first noticed the hat, is included in the doc.) The main show went smoothly enough, but then came the final performance.
Rather than sticking with the performance blocking that was rehearsed, Kanye went off-book and called the cast back up onto the stage as he shared some political commentary aimed at partisan viewers, while also addressing his then-ongoing talks about running for President. To the SNL stars hearing those words for the first time, it was a bit of a nightmare situation. As Nwodim put it in the Peacock doc:
I was like, ‘I don’t want to be up here for this, ‘cause I don’t agree with this. And standing up here looks like I’m standing in solidarity.' I was like, 'Don't make any faces. Neutral face. Neutral face. Everyone's gotta know I'm just fulfilling my duties as a cast member.' It's like your first day at school, and you're like, 'I don't wanna get in trouble. Y'all told me to come up here, I'm up here.' I remember looking around the stage. Something made me be like, 'Oh, are there other Black people up here in the cast?' And I look, and no, I was the only one! And I thought, 'They had a meeting!' And so then I'm like, 'These motherfuckers!'
Case in point: Kenan Thompson shared his thoughts about the off-kilter performance, and confirmed that he did indeed disappear from the 30 Rock stage whenever he grasped what was happening. As the All That vet put it:
When he grabbed the mic and was just like, wandering around, you could see that he was gearing up to say something. I was like, 'I'm out.' It would have been cool if he just had did the music thing, and, I don't know, just spoke through the hat, I guess, 'cause the hat was loud.
To date, that was Kanye West's last Saturday Night Live appearance, with a string of public controversies and legal issues popping up in the years since. So if he does pop up on the show somewhere in the 2025 TV schedule, it'll be one for the ages no doubt.
Do keep tuning in every Saturday night on NBC to see what other former superstars will be returning to pay tribute to the iconic sketch series. What's a guy gotta do to get more Opera Man in his life?
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