Rumors in the chatter-sphere, and dispatches analyzing the veracity of those rumors, have been flying about in northern Italy in the last days — buttressed by works on a massive stage currently under construction in Reggio Emilia, Italy, north of Florence — that the world’s most famous erstwhile shoe magnate and current semi-permanent-vacationer-in-Italy Kanye ‘Ye’ West, pictured above in his usual full-body-black in Milan on September 22, will be performing live Reggio Emilia in very short order. On October 20, in fact. Note: According to the reporting, this is the alleged drop date of Mr. West’s next (11th) album.
However: This morning, at this writing, the top bulletin on the “saintleone” TikTok account — which user had been posting regular, if breathless, accounts of the stage works and the high-voltage chatter among Mr. West’s thousands of Italian fans — is simple and blunt: Concerto ye annullato, roughly, Ye’s concert (is) annulled. Cited were time factors.
Leaving aside the question of whether there was ever a real possibility or even a serious discussion between principals for such a concert, or whether the stage at the Campovolo arena was being prepared for some other performer, the dust storm of rumor kicked up the singular factoid that Mr. West has been at work in a Milan studio, if not directly on the next album, on something. In turn, that also-unconfirmed factoid did supply a very welcome news byte of professional, core-business grounded-ness amid Mr. West’s and his wife’s increasingly erratic, mysterious and controversial months-long “residency” in northern Italy.
The nominal idea of Mr. West actually at work on any musical project in a sound studio does, at a bare minimum, offer that Mr. West might have at least been in Italy for the past few months for something approaching a real reason, not simply to provide us with a latter-day re-enactment of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes while riding in a Venetian water taxi.
In the largest sense, quite a hefty quotient of Mr. West’s current public relations predicament — which predicament is thorny, global, resolutely self-made, and by no means his only business problem — is that he and/or the members of the West team charged with his image-maintenance never explain anything he says or does. In the “Ye” cosmos, no utterance or act stemming from the center of that cosmos need be explained, and his fans, whose numbers only seem to increase, need no explanations. Much like his good friend Donald Trump, Mr. West seems to operate on the principle that the portion of the world’s population that is not composed of his fans is not worth any explanations he might offer them. This markedly warped public-relations equation puts Mr. West in a tiny, self-contained box in which, to him, all is as it should be. Professionally, as we saw last fall when his partners in his multi-million-dollar fashion business abandoned him, it has been disastrous.
Since Mr. West and his wife Bianca Censori arrived in Italy over the summer, Italy has had the role of the beleaguered country-of-choice put upon it. Predictably, obviously, there was outrage in Venice as Mr. West’s and Ms. Censori’s public displays of affection veered outside the bounds of acceptable public behavior, especially in Italy, but that has not quelled the public’s interest in the man’s doings, nor in those of his Italian-American wife.
Key takeaway is this: Since his business implosion last fall, vast unpredictability is what Kanye West is selling. In Italy, that sales strategy is working. When Mr. West returns from his extended Italian vacation and gets back to school in the States, we can expect that that sales strategy will be tested more heavily.
Not much information can be gleaned from the shot of West, above, exiting the building in Milan’s Via Gesu (Jesus Street) housing the extremely high-end Neapolitan bespoke tailor Mariano Rubinacci. We can hope for Mr. West’s sake that there is indeed a sound studio somewhere in the building’s basement and that he is coming from work. But if as it seems Mr. West did in fact just visit the tailor, we can also be pleased that he will be getting his workaday all-black judo/karate/ninja-warrior uniforms from the hands of one of Italy’s most proper, tweedy suitmakers. It’s arguable that Rubinacci will never have been commissioned to run up a ninja suit. But: As ninja suits go, Rubinacci’s will certainly be excellent.
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