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Driving around the morning after attending Ye’s sold-out show at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium, I found myself, understandably, in the mood for a Kanye set. Much of the setlist at SoFi was built to function like a one-man Verzuz, a reminder that Ye has hits for days, timeless songs that both take you back to the moment in time when they were released but also sound potent and barely dated, even years and decades later. As I flew up the 405 on a solo mission, sun beaming down on the mountains on the horizon, I put my library of Kanye songs on shuffle and within a few tracks, landed on one of his best features: 2010’s “Live Fast, Die Young,” born out of the Hawaii sessions that would yield My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but ultimately placed on Rick Ross’ equally excellent project from that year, Teflon Don. It’s a titanic song, two artists in their imperial phases talking cash shit, but one all-time Kanye bar in particular stuck out more than usual on this listen: “I’m back by unpopular demand/At least he still poppin’ in Japan… Screams from the fans: ‘Yeezy, always knew you’d be on top again!’”

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. Sixteen years ago, Ye was in a position similar to the one he’s in now, a position he’s found himself in often—rapping his way out of cultural timeout, testing the waters to see if we’ll take him back, finding solace in being poppin’ in Japan while he field-tests his comeback.

The stakes in 2010 were obviously much lower; all he’d really done was let his egomania and grief curdle into disrespecting America’s Sweetheart on national TV, which now seems like a minor infraction compared to making a song called “Heil Hitler,” wearing a Klan hood in an interview, and the other host of Weird Shit Ye’s done in the past few years. Still, Kanye took the greater public’s exasperation with him back then as a serious probational stint, retreated to a lair in Hawaii like a mad scientist, and didn’t emerge until the music was bulletproof. In one of my favorite Kanye interviews, a 2013 Yeezus-era chat with New York Times critic Jon Caramanica, Ye would dismiss MBDTF as a “backhanded apology”: “I was like: Let me show you guys what I can do, and please accept me back.’” In that case, he overachieved—from the moment you hear the album’s opening notes, you can feel him swinging for the rafters, and then the first line confirms it, that refrain-as-mission statement: “Can we get much higher?”

In the years since Kanye became Ye, his offenses have gotten more serious and the music has gotten progressively less impressive; the best thing you can say about Ye’s new album Bully is that it’s at least better than some of the sonically-unfocused, lyrically provocative-for-provocation’s-sake (“Now I’m Ye Cosby, bitch”) music he made at his creative nadir. (Donda and Kids See Ghosts innocent!)

It would be fine to admit that a middle-aged Ye (he turns 49 in June) might not be able to recapture his peak, or that Bully and the tour are, at best, a step towards that goal; instead both Ye and his fans are already in victory-lap mode. A proper comeback in hip-hop calls for a little cockinesss—verses like “Live Fast” only hit because he delivered them with the swag of someone who never doubted he’d be back. But from where I sat inside the stadium, moments like Ye commanding the crowd to sing along to “Heartless” then saying “this is what 80,000 people sounds like,” or him impishly smirking “Welcome to SoFi, motherfuckers” felt like flexes deserving of a better show.