70 thousand fans of American rapper Kanye West, also known as Ye, attended his concert held at the Tbilisi Dynamo Arena. The event was preceded by unprecedented excitement, fueled, among other things, by the singer’s scandalous reputation. The Georgian authorities financed the concert as part of the Starring Georgia program, designed to increase the tourist attractiveness of Georgia, as well as increase the rating of the ruling Georgian Dream party among young people. They talk about the concert Georgy Dvali And Igor Gavrilov.
The Tbilisi concert was the sixth on Kanye West’s current tour. There could have been significantly more performances, but Ye’s person unexpectedly turned out to be non grata in several countries at once. His already scheduled concerts were canceled in London, Marseille, Chorzow (Poland), Basel, Prague and Reggio Emilia (Italy), and he was officially banned from entering the UK and Poland.
The reason is the artist’s anti-Semitic statements and his declared sympathy for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. These scandals are a thing of the past; Kanye West said he regrets. However, if you once sold T-shirts with swastikas on your website, don’t expect everyone to quickly forget about it.
Georgian social networks and the media did not actively discuss the “anti-Semitic component” of the image of the American rapper, even though the day before the concert in Tbilisi it became known that the July concert in Prague had been cancelled.
The Jewish community has lived in Tbilisi since the first century AD, and according to a popular narrative in the country, there has “never been anti-Semitism.” Since he did not exist, Georgians believe that they are not at all obliged to react to the anti-Semitic antics of popular figures from other countries. And Kanye West is “just a very popular rapper” – that’s all.
The fact that the concert was organized by the Ministry of Culture under the Starring Georgia program, a government project financed from the treasury and created to promote the country’s tourist image through performances by world stars, also played a role in the absence of this agenda in the media. Neither pro-government nor opposition media focused attention on the “dark”, scandalous side of West’s personality. No one wanted to once again irritate young Georgian voters who adore the rapper.
Concerts by world-famous performers have been a distinctive feature of Georgian life in recent years.
Concerts by Bruno Mars, Scorpions, Imagine Dragons, The Killers were held with great fanfare, and last year Justin Timberlake performed at the same stadium with a large crowd of Russian tourists (see. “Kommersant” dated July 25, 2025). But there has never been such a rush.
Ticket sales on the local platform tkt.ge began on May 12, and about 70 thousand tickets sold out in 8 hours. They were expensive by local standards: from 400 lari ($150) to 1600 lari ($600). “This is another record of ours, and Georgia is again in the lead,” said the organizers after the almost instantaneous sale of tickets. “We will meet on June 12 at the Dynamo Arena around the first 360% stage in Georgia.”
Kanye West flew to Tbilisi the day before the concert with his wife Bianca Censori. The couple stayed at the prestigious Stamba Hotel. On the same day, photographers captured the couple walking on the veranda. The censor was dressed, as usual, scandalously – in a dress that was too transparent. Then the celebrities went out onto Kostava Street, where a limousine and a crowd of fans were waiting for them. Kanye and Bianca tried khachapuri at a local restaurant and, according to media reports, were satisfied.
The Georgian capital seriously prepared for the concert. The mayor’s office announced that the metro and buses on a number of routes will serve passengers on an extended schedule on the day of the concert, and car traffic on the streets adjacent to the stadium will be limited. On the day of the concert, reinforced patrol police worked in the Didube area from seven o’clock in the morning.
Hotel prices and apartment rental prices have risen two to three times. There were especially many guests arriving from the Russian Federation, not only those who arrived on direct flights from Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also those who arrived from the southern regions of the country through North Ossetia and the Verkhniy Lars checkpoint. The cost of tourist packages with tickets to Ye’s show in Russia started from 122 thousand rubles.
On the day of the concert, the rapper’s fans began to flock to the stadium as early as 17:00. The wide Avenue named after Akaki Tsereteli was completely blocked, as were all adjacent streets.
There were so many police officers that it seemed as if the Ministry of Internal Affairs had sent the entire contingent of the capital’s police to maintain order. Tickets in front of special turnstiles were checked by stewards and tkt.ge employees in stylized clothes, and police officers stood not only near the entrances to the territory of the Dynamo Arena, but also literally at every step at the high fence, so that no one would try to climb over the fence. There were a lot of young people, a lot of foreigners, including Russians and African-Americans who came from nowhere in Georgia.
If Justin Timberlake brought a lightweight version of the scenery for his show to Tbilisi, then Kanye West installed at the stadium the same hemisphere with a projection of the globe, which he first used in April, at the beginning of the tour, at Los Angeles’ SoFi Stadium.
This design is the absolute pinnacle of world concert scenography. All that remained was for the artist, as in the widely circulated video, to perform a cover version of “Gray Night” from “Tender May,” which was attributed to him by artificial intelligence and which topped the Shazam charts. The Russian-speaking public was waiting for her on May 30 in Istanbul, where “all secular Moscow” gathered. However, it was not heard in Tbilisi either. It seems that the author himself is not at all aware of this phenomenon (the history of the version can be found here).
But West began the concert with the song “Georgia On My Mind,” famously performed by Ray Charles. This is the easiest and most common way among foreign touring performers to establish quick contact with the local public, even though the song is about a completely different Georgia – not Georgia, but the state of Georgia.
True, the song was played only in the speakers, performed by Tony Williams. The rapper went on stage to it without trying to sing along. During the concert, Kanye West performed songs from all of his albums, as well as several cover versions and songs from ¥$, his joint project with musician Ty Dolla Sign.
However, how did he “perform”? I tried to fulfill it. The rapper performed to an instrumental soundtrack, which is quite consistent with today’s practice in this genre.
Several times during the concert, West asked the sound engineers to stop the track in the middle and play another one, confused the words, and started singing again. Moreover, he gave commands out loud, not at all embarrassed by the public.
Perhaps some of the Moscow guests remembered Mikhail Boyarsky’s concerts at the Ikra club in the 2000s, when the musketeer openly spoke into the microphone: “Seryozha, dear, now is the 11th song on the disc.” It was almost like that, only on top of a large hemisphere with continents. In general, the public was left with the most contradictory impressions of Ye’s sound. Some reviews after the fact included “the bass that drowned out everything,” while others were completely delighted.
It is worth adding that for those Moscow fans of Kanye West who did not make it to Tbilisi, on June 14, as part of the Beat Film Festival, the film “In the Name of Who?” will be shown for the last time. This is a documentary film directed by Nico Ballesteros, for which he filmed materials using an iPhone over the course of six years. It can serve as an important addition to a live concert.
Those who saw Ye as a small figure at the “pole” of the hemisphere and followed his story in the tabloids see on the screen a living person, building and destroying his business empire, losing touch with his family, crying, searching and completely going off the rails. When he appears in the frame with Elon Musk, now a trillionaire, the viewer sees two people who have achieved everything that can be achieved on earth. And clearly not happy ones.
