Rumored Concert Canceled, Or Postponed? Plus (Alleged) Recording In Milan

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 regulation full-body-black ninja kit in Milan on September 22, will be performing live in 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.

Naturally, since this is the Kanye West cosmos in which multiple contradictory propositions can be juggled, reversed, re-reversed and spun out infinitely, it can very well be that the concert will magically bloom into reality in the coming week. In denying late on October 13 that any promoter or artist had requested any of the mandated permits from the local Reggio Emilia authorities (to hold any concert in the Campovolo venue on Friday, October 13), Reggio Emilia administrator Maria Rita Cocciufa told reporters that such a request had been filed for the venue for the date of October 20, the rumored album drop date. It was the first whiff of official confirmation that any such concert had been booked. The Italians calculate that Mr. West would draw up to 100,000 ticketholders. Unclear, at the moment, is who would produce or promote the event.

Not that a TikTok account should be trusted over a city official, but the top bulletin on the « saintleone » TikTok account — which user has been posting regular, if breathless, accounts of the stage works and the high-voltage chatter among Mr. West’s thousands of Italian fans — was simple and blunt: Concerto ye annullato, roughly, Ye’s concert (is) annulled. Cited were time factors. In Italian, annullato is rather final, but it can be that the cryptic post was not meant to address the status of a « Ye » concert generally but was intended to describe the status of a concert on October 13.

Leaving aside the questions of whether there was ever even a serious discussion between principals for such a concert, whether the stage at the Campovolo arena was being prepared for some other performer, or whether the work is actually meant for a concert to be given at some point by Mr. West, 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 unconfirmed factoid did supply a very welcome news byte of professional, core-business activity, somewhat grounding 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 or on stage does, minimally, offer the possibility that Mr. West might have been in Italy for the past few months for something approaching a viable work-related reason. It means that he was not simply in Italy heedlessly flailing about, a victim of his own whim, to improvise 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. Amid the vast annual summer migration of British and American celebrities flooding the two choice « beach countries » on the Med — France and Italy — Mr. West and Ms. Censori stood out. First, they didn’t really hit the beaches or the Alpine lakes, which is surprising, given Ms. Censori’s rigorous, if scant, workout/leotard/barely-there but beach-ready way of dressing. No Portofino, no Bari, no villa on Lago Como, nothing. The couple dropped into land-locked Florence, on the Arno, and did a kind of hub-and-spoke hopscotch through northern Italy. Mr. West did make a two-song cameo on stage at an early-August Travis Scott concert in Rome, a moment Mr. Scott hyperbolically celebrated to his audience by saying: « There is no Utopia without Kanye West. There is no Travis Scott without Kanye West. There is no Rome without Kanye West. »

Predictably, 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, but that has not quelled the public’s interest in the man’s doings, nor in those of his Italian-American wife. Most telling was where they were not, and that was in the London or Paris back-to-school fashion weeks, where Mr. West had previously been a front-row fixture. Nor, in any kind of serious front-row way, did he show up for duty in Milan during its fashion week, a just-around-the-corner kind of thing. Instead he staged a series of impromptu street-fair-like photo-shoots/walks with Mrs. West, mobbed by paparazzi and by locals alike, and openly ridiculed in the press. As September wore on with no word of explanation and no whiff of change in any of that, it became embarrassing.

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, top, 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 and that he is coming from work. But if as it seems Mr. West did in fact just visit the tailor for a fitting, 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.