Kanye West received a call from "some guy who used to run a multi-billion dollar company or something" recently, and it didn't go very well. This ex-chairman of such-and-such apparently said he "doesn't approve of the interviews and the way I'm going about things lately," West told an eager crowd in Brooklyn on Tuesday night, the first of four Yeezus tour dates he's playing in New York. "You see that's what I call 'free advice,' because people tell me what to do and I haven't seen a check for it yet."

The lesson, as it almost always is when West dips into the pre-allotted time for stage banter (or, if you must, "rants"), was that life is too short to be spent worrying about what anyone thought you should be doing. For all of West's hobnobbing with the Mark Zuckerbergs and Bob Igers of the world, it's still of critical importance for him to stay true to his own voice. "The people who give me 'advice,'" he seethed on stage at Barclays Center. "I don't see them vibing with 15,000 people in Brooklyn tonight."

Barclays Center, the house that Jay Z christened with a hefty run of shows, was louder on Tuesday than it ever was when Hov performed there. Comparing the two is almost ridiculous: Jay, the reserved, within-the-beat rapper who shot down Kanye's request to have dancers on their joint Watch the Throne tour is a pretty handy foil to West's erratic, over-design-everything performance style. On Tuesday, West was joined by a bevy of stocking and mask-clad dancers, a man dressed as Jesus (Kanye: "Hi, white Jesus") and a would-be demon with LED eyes -- all of whom scale a movable mountain under a 60-foot screen and kinetic second stage that West rested on while snow fell around him. It's a tour unlike any other traveling arenas around the country.

As West was nearing the end of his sermon about the multi-billionaire (this time, delivered quite literally in the shadow of the mount), things got a little dicey. After suggesting the audience learn more about Nikola Tesla ("and I'm not talking about the car") and Alejandro Jodorowsky, he eventually just started yelling things like, "you don't know who the fuck he is!" The crowd was too hyped to really care that it was being reminded of its collective ignorance, and cheered anyway.