As we left him in more than a little professional disarray Italy last week, Ye, aka the artist formerly known as Kanye West, faced a choice, tendered by the Reggio Emilia prefecture, of possibly giving his (rumored) concert this Friday, October 27. The first date of choice, October 20, was deemed by the local administration as too swift to have been securely executed. As the clock has ticked resolutely down and demolished the October 20 date, in the Ye/West camp, there has been and continues to be little-to-no siginificant public movement toward realizing a concert (to be attended by estimated 80,000-100,000).
In plain massive-concert-production English, just a few short days out from this (proposed) event, there are as of this writing no pre-sales, a highly unusual and ordinarily deleterious marketing circumstance in the work of filling gargantuan venues, as Reggio Emilia’s RCF arena is. Fans of Ye’s can hope that some several thousand biglietti (tickets) might trickle online as this week rolls on, but, according to a 22 October dispatch by Italy’s bedrock news agency, Agencia Nazionale Stampa Associata (ANSA), any realistic expectations that a concert of this size could be mounted by this Friday are dwindling by the hour. Repeat: By the hour. Unclear, still, is whether the Ye/West organization, such as it is, has found time even to respond to the regional administrators’ offer of the October 27 date.
As pointed out in this space, the Italians have experienced the resolutely strange summer vacation residency of Ye and his Italian-American spouse, Bianca Censori. But rumoring a concert for a reported hundred thousand people and then, in fits and starts, not making the moves to stage it is a different order of hide-and-seek than the Italians are accustomed to expect from anybody.
Time was, the artist now formally known as Ye, aka Kanye West, understood the basic music-celebrity equation, namely, that there is an unspoken, powerful “contract” between performer and audience. A significant part of the contract is that that the fans’ affection for and loyalty to this or that performer must be returned, in kind, to that fan base. There has to be some effort given to and for the people who are paying you.
Unfortunately, the muddled road map that Ye/West is now offering his paying audience does seem to indicate a deeper set of problems, or at least a deeper sort of secession on his part. It can be that, as West has so clearly lost affection for and has resolutely de-accessioned other elements in his life — his fashion business, for instance — he has also lost affection for his audience, or at a minimum has lost affection for the implicit contract between performer and audience.
For their part, the Italians — in the form of official Italy and the Italian press — seem finally to be losing their patience with theatrics at this level, with this much at stake. Which is to say, even if the communication from Ye/West or his production team remains the communication of non-engagement in dialogue with the authorities controlling the venue, that prolonged caprice, whatever motive might be behind it, stands as an extraordinary insult to his hosts, who have made the sizeable venue available to him. Gauging from the tone of the October 22 ANSA dispatch regarding the state of play, the Italians are moving on. There will be another meeting of the Reggio Emilia prefecture in relation to the October 27 date, but, putting it diplomatically, this Friday’s realization as viable concert date seems to be in the process of being cut to pieces by the artist himself
Miracles do happen, dei ex machinae do float down and save the day, and it would be a very good thing for Ye/West now for that to happen. It would require that he live up to the now-wide expectations and execute a performance. People seem to want him on stage, still. But in this instance, it seems as if the point of the whole exercise of arranging a performance lay, in the mind of its progenitor, somewhere else entirely; that the result was never meant to be a fully realized concert. Instead, the act of a disengaged attempt such as this one seems increasingly to be one of those evanescent constructs manufactured to prove something to and/or for the artist.
Bottom line: If, this week, the Reggio Emilia adminstrators do not lose their patience and offer Ye/West yet another date, it would only increase the chances that an actual performance could be mounted. But whether that is something to which Ye/West would positively respond remains deeply unclear.
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