Kanye West and Lady Gaga concert tour dates announced :
Kanye West and Lady Gaga are taking their show on the road.
Tour dates were announced today for their Fame Kills North American tour. Kayne and Gaga will be making 34 stops across the continent. The tour kicks off November 10th in Phoenix, AZ and ends January 24th in Dallas, TX.
We want to go to the show to see Kayne try, just try to take the microphone away from Lady Gaga. ... Source ...
*Note* Kanye West has pulled out and will reschedule his tour.*
Kanye announces tour, awaits ticket-buyers' verdict :
How fed up are music fans with the antics of Kanye West?
The answer to that question should begin to take shape next week, when tickets go on sale for the first batch of concerts on the rapper's joint tour with Lady Gaga, dubbed (with painful, retroactive irony) the "Fame Kills" tour.
The double-bill is set to hit 34 cities, starting with Phoenix on Nov. 10, and taking in a clutch of Canadian cities – including Vancouver (Nov. 24), Toronto (Jan. 6, Air Canada Centre, on sale Oct. 3), Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton and Saskatoon – before winding up in Dallas on Jan. 24.
Though anger over West's boorish interruption of Taylor Swift's victory speech at Sunday's MTV Music Video Awards continues to course through the Internet, a series of very public apologies has mitigated the initial reaction. Perhaps more importantly, the dual headliners remain among the year's best-selling artists, a status that could be enough to compensate for Kanye's latest bout of acting out.  ... Source ...

Kanye West Announces 2009 Tour :
"I like the challenge of having to win people over with a new concept," West said in a recent interview. "My father (Ray West) was a salesman. And I saw him have to talk people into things and expose people to new ideas all the time. And I like that. What's the point if you're not presenting something new to people, that people might not be ready for, and exposing people to new ideas?"
Expect new theatrical ideas when West takes to the road this summer. West will launch a European tour featuring his latest album, "808s & Heartbreak," in July and expects the tour to hit the United States by fall.
Speaking on the set of a recent video shoot for his friend 88-Keys' "Stay Up (Viagra)," West said he was excited to find new ways to blend his songs together.
"Being on stage, it's the glory," West said.
The producer-turned-rapper-turned-singer has consulted with many of the same people who helped inspire staging for his last set of shows, the "Glow in the Dark Tour." They include filmmaker Spike Jonze, who directed West's upcoming "See You In My Nightmares" video, and The Jim Henson Company.
West was alone on a colorful, futuristic tilted stage for nearly the entire performance of his "Glow" tour last year. It came after West's mother Donda died in November 2007 and he had broken up with his fiance, events that put him in the mood for a less-than-celebratory hip-hop concert.
"I get bored with stuff," West said in a recent interview. "The last one was done because I didn't feel like doing a rap show, because of all I was going through in my life. All I felt like was playing with 'Star Wars' (toys) and being Luke Skywalker. So I figured you know, 'I'll do a rap show if I can just be like Luke Skywalker every night.' And so I just wrote my own sci-fi and played in it."
The blue period that inspired that tour also set the stage for "808s & Heartbreak." It features West using the Auto-Tune technology popularized by T-Pain to sing in a hollow, distant voice about loss and sorrow.
He says he considers "808s" as much a fashion project as those $400-plus Louis Vuitton sneakers he recently crafted.
"The subject matter was real life. The medium was melody," West said. "And the format was very similar to the way people would organize a fashion show, moreso than an album. And I felt like this was my season. ... I deliver my music more as a designer than a producer now." ... Source ...

Upcoming Tour Dates for Kanye West can be found here.

Kanye West announces tour dates :
Despite the recent controversy surrounding Kanye West and his drunken slurs on the VMAs, Kanye West and Lady Gaga announced their tour dates! This is long awaited news seeing as the collaborated tour was declared months ago.
Being the last show of the tour is the best show of the whole thing (other than the first show.) The artists always play their hardest and go out with a bang. Guess who's last? DALLAS. Awesome.
So after all of this hoopla with Kanye West, do you still want to go see this show? I do. This is not to reward Kanye for his disrespect and inappropriate behavior, but to enjoy his talent for music. After all, he does write his own stuff and perform onstage the entire time alone (no band or backup singers.) The latter fact stems from his last tour with Rihanna and Lupe Fiasco, where he performed alone onstage the entire set.
Since we saw how bizarre Lady Gaga's performance of "Paparazzi" was at the VMAs, it makes me even more antsy to see her live just to see how wild things will get. This will be a good show, I'm almost sure of it.
Even though Pollstar is a dependable site, this is the only site currently posting dates for the "Fame Kills" tour. As far as I know, tickets are not on sale yet. Keep an eye on national ticket sites to learn more. ... Source ...

Kanye West Announces Tour With Lady Gaga, "She's So Incredible" :
As if there weren't enough awesome concerts this summer, Kanye West has just announced that he's going on tour with the new princess of pop, Lady GaGa. Kanye was a guest on "The View" this afternoon where he dished on his summer plans. He said, "Me and Lady GaGa are going on tour now. She's talented and she's so incredible that she's not an opening act, we're doing our show together." ( Holly Scoop ) ... Source ...

Kanye West Biography :

Most hip-hop producers-turned-MCs make the transition awkwardly and not entirely successfully. This makes Kanye West one of the genre's great anomalies. Along with OutKast, he is the most critically acclaimed hip-hop artist of the 2000s, and one of the best selling in any genre: his first album, 2004's The College Dropout, debuted at Number Two, while 2005's Late Registration and 2007's Graduation both debuted at Number One. Additionally, West's persona — a hardheaded striver who lusts after the good life but remains conflicted about it — was unique among mainstream hip-hop stars at a time when the playa/gangsta ethic exemplified by his mentor Jay-Z was predominant. Rather than pleading for street credibility, West's lyrics, like the man reciting them, are comfortable with their roots in middle-class suburbia and as a result communicate an honesty rare in any field.

West was born in Atlanta to Ray West, a photojournalist, ex-Black Panther and counselor, and Donda West, an academic. The couple divorced when Kanye was three, and Donda raised him during school years in Chicago's South Shore suburb. Kanye spent a year in college but dropped out to pursue a musical career. He began making hip-hop beats for local acts before moving on to placing tracks on Top Ten albums by Jermaine Dupri, Foxy Brown, and Lil' Kim.

West's big break came when West put together the beat for Jay-Z's "This Can't Be Life," from the Roc-a-Fella co-founder's 2000 The Dynasty: Roc la Familia album. The following year West handled production on a third of the 15 tracks on Jay-Z's The Blueprint (2001, Number One), including the smash "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" (2001, Number Eight) and the Nas dis track, "Takeover."

West's hot streak as a producer continued apace with his "chipmunk soul" style — sped-up vocal snippets of old R&B records — inspired, according to West, by the RZA's production for the Wu-Tang Clan and their associates. His signature sound helped make him one of the most in-demand producers. In the two-and-a-half years between The Blueprint and his own debut, West contributed tracks to two-dozen albums, among them: Cam'ron's Come Home with Me (2002); Talib Kweli's Quality (2002); Nas's The Lost Tapes (2002); T.I.'s Trap Muzik (2003); Beyoncé's Dangerously in Love (2003); Ludacris's Chicken-N-Beer (2003); The Diary of Alicia Keys (2003) featuring the smash "You Don't Know My Name" (2003, Number Three); Kamikaze, by fellow Chicagoan Twista, featuring the hit "Slow Jamz" (2004, Number One); and Jay-Z's The Blueprint 2.0: The Gift and the Curse (Number One, 2002) and The Black Album (Number One, 2003).

In the midst of this hubbub of activity, in October 2002, West was in a near-fatal car crash. He had to have his jaw wired shut and wrote the song "Through the Wire" (2004, Number 15) about it, rapping his lyrics (yes) through the wire. The track helped build the buzz for West's first album. After several delays, The College Dropout was issued on February 10, 2004 and yielded two more hits in "Jesus Walks" (2004, Number 11) and "All Falls Down" (2004, Number Seven). That year West won three Grammy Awards, including Best Rap Album and Best Rap Song ("Jesus Walks).

West continued making hits for others appearing on post-College Dropout cuts like Brandy's Talk About Our Love" (Number 36, 2004), Slum Village's "Selfish" (with John Legend; Number 55, 2004), and Common's "The Corner" (Number 42 R&B, 2005). Additionally, he produced all but two of the songs on Common's 2005 album Be (Number Two), and signed R&B singer John Legend to his Getting Out Our Dreams (GOOD) label.

West's second album, Late Registration, was issued August 30, 2005, and went straight to Number One, producing several more hits: "Diamonds From Sierra Leone" (Number 43, 2005), "Gold Digger" (Number One, 2005), "Touch the Sky" (Number 42, 2005), and "Heard 'Em Say" (Number 26, 2005). Controversy ensued three days after the album's release when, during a telethon for Hurricane Katrina relief on NBC, West went off script: "I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says they're looting. If you see a white family, it says they're looking for food . . . George Bush doesn't care about black people." His statement caused an uproar and the television network issued an apology. (West's utterance was later sampled into a scorching anti-Bush song by rappers the Legendary K.O., "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People," which utilized West's rhythm track from "Gold Digger.") Late Registration went on to win the Best Rap Album Grammy Award.

West garnered headlines in early 2006, when he appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone wearing a crown of thorns in a shot inspired by the Martin Scorsese film The Last Temptation of Christ. After concentrating on producing albums by John Legend (Once Again) and Common (Finding Forever), live performance (with a DJ, live drummer, backing singers, and string section accompanying him), West announced his third album, Graduation, to be issued September 11, 2007 — the same date as 50 Cent's Curtis, prompting a rivalry between the MCs. 50 Cent swore he would stop making music if he didn't outsell Kanye, which he didn't: Graduation sold nearly a million copies its first week (an increasingly rare event in the mid-2000s) and maintained a consistent chart presence thanks to the singles "Stronger" (Number One, 2007), "Good Life" (Number Seven), and "Can't Tell Me Nothing" (Number 41).    ...Source...