It's not a concert. There is no live music: someone pressed play and the music started. It looks like a concert though. We are in a sports hall, or rather in the Italian sports hall par excellence, the Assago Forum. There are tickets that were put on sale just a week ago (many unsold, repeat on the 24th in Bologna). There are two global stars, Kanye West Ty Dolla $ign – both in all black and with a mask on their faces that covers their eyes, nose and mouth – who present Vultures, their just-released collaborative album, which appears in Stars and Carnival also contains the choirs by Inter's Curva Sud, recorded in a studio in Barona.
The entire parterre functions as a stage without a raised stage; The audience is in the stands 360 degrees. Nobody rings the bell. Nobody sings, they don't even have a microphone. The same goes for the guests – Quavo, Freddie Gibbs, Playboi Carti and other big names in the American rap scene – who arrive throughout the evening. The idea of a concert isn't even mentioned: no video, no choreography, just a cylindrical cloth over the stage with live images projected onto it and fake smoke on the floor. End. We are caught between conceptual achievement and trolling. It's not even something comparable to DJ sets, where something happens live anyway: here the songs are those of the album (with the exception of Everybody in the version with the sample not granted by the Backstreet Boys), in the overall reproduction.
It's not a scam, no one could have expected anything else. The ticket clearly labeled the evening as an “audio experience,” another one-sided idea from Kanye West, the world’s most talked-about rapper. The one who interrupts the MTV Awards ceremony to tell a shocked Taylor Swift that Beyoncé deserves her award; the one who runs for President of the United States and ends up supporting Trump and white supremacist theories; the one who is losing millions of dollars in contracts with fashion brands because of his anti-Semitic and denial outbursts and lenient judgments about Hitler.
The public reaction is twofold. The most active fan base participates like they would at a concert: choirs, physicality, sweat. Most seem to be here just to say, or rather show on social media, “I was there.” A trend that could already be observed at The Weeknd's concerts last summer – after the announcement they were immediately sold out and the hype machine was in full swing – and the audience was lukewarm and distracted except for the first few rows. When attending a show becomes an investment in one's own social image – tickets for Kanye and Ty Dolla $ign were between 115 and 207 euros – there is a risk that the future of live music resembles a dystopian fantasy: The The artist's physical presence is no longer necessary; the empathetic exchange between stage and audience is obsolete.
The masked rapper seen on the forum, which could include anyone, is a dark omen. And another signal came when, after listening to the new songs, the audience showed a more intense engagement with the hits of the past, from Runaway to Off the Grid, played by the system on an empty stage. Yes, that's what he's wanted to be called for some time, he invented the non-show. He had already brought the idea of listening to parties to life with the previous album Donda, but then at least there was the exclusive experience of hearing the upcoming new music in advance. Not even this, Vultures is already on the platforms (and in the United States it reached number 1 on the Billboard charts). But perhaps we should no longer consider Ye an artist. Rather, it is a brand. And then there is the possibility that it can be dematerialized.