Update 05.02.11 - Kylie.com has finally confirmed the concert date in Manila - although I'm not too happy with the results. The concert has been scheduled for Tuesday, July 5, 2011. Ugh, it's a week night concert! Tuesday, of all days. Personally, I can only hope that I can get out of work for the night, plus the need to actually afford the tickets.
Good luck to all of us Kylie fans! Tickets officially go on sale by May 6!
Original post follows:
Admittedly, I'm a huge Kylie Minogue fan. In fact, I dedicated a rather lengthy Technicolor Musings post to discussing her role in my life as a gay man, metaphorically speaking of course. And yes, watching a live Kylie Minogue concert together with my partner remains to be one of the big ticket items on my bucket list.
Recently news has broken out in the local part of the social network world that Kylie has confirmed that she'll be coming to Manila this July - which is pretty exciting news indeed.
If it's true. And that's where the trouble lies at this point.
So let's remain calm for a moment here and try digging past the social media hype to validate whether this is true or not. I promise to update this post with more accurate information should it come along as well.
Naturally our first stop in our quest to validate these rumors is by going straight to the source - Kylie Minogue's official website. Now when you check her Tour Dates section, we get this:
So in terms of the official site, we can see that (1) there is no official Manila concert announced as of this time, (2) she will spend pretty much all of June in Australia and (3) she will be in South Africa by July 7, which falls within the first full week of July for this calendar year. At this point, it's not impossible that a Manila concert date might be scheduled, for as long as it becomes a one night only limited engagement on either July 1 or 2, leaving her time to fly to South Africa and set up in time for her concert there. Still, a bit iffy, and all the internet buzz seems pretty sure that the concert will happen in the first week.
[Update 04.28.11] - Kylie.com news has just confirmed that she will perform in Singapore on June 29, 2011, which is a Wednesday. This further narrows the possibilities that she'll be performing in the Manila within the same week unless she schedules her shows on Saturday or Sunday.
One of the more significant proponents of the local buzz definitely has to be Tim Yap since he posted this message on April 20:
While other people are treating his word as being as good as gold or something, history tells us that Tim Yap has gotten it wrong before and the fact that no major news agencies in the country have decided to publish solid news about this apart from vague mentions of a July concert with no confirmed dates as of this time. Great.
There are scant blog posts about this story apart from this item from I Am Noypi blog post published on April 20 and this other post from M.E.S.S. published last April 23 that both cite the Tim Yap tweet as a source and a more recent I Am Jammed post published on April 25 that does not cite any sources. There's a short post on Blog for Noob that just points you back to the I Am Noypi post as a reference. There's also this isolated post from Live Concert in Manila that mentions the Kylie concert without citing references.
So yeah, the blogosphere is not a source for answers at this point since everyone is just referencing everyone else or is simply not posting references at all. For all we know, this is all just some elaborate ploy to get Kylie to hold a concert here by generating sufficient internet buzz and demand for her. A curious idea with some potential indeed, but in the end it just seems sad.
On the social media front, these poster images have started to circulate the web as well as "proof" of the concert, but if you check closely they'll all attributed to someone known as Merlito Designs.
If you check out his Facebook page, you'll discover that this is a 25 year old graphics designer who clearly likes making poster mock-ups as part of his portfolio. According to his Flickr profile, he's from Caloocan and it looks like he posted his images on April 20 as well in response to the Tim Yap Twitter buzz. Just check out the comments on this image. So these aren't necessarily officially sanctioned concert promo posters - they're just the products of yet another dedicated Kylie fan out there.
So is Kylie really coming to Manila? I don't think we have definite proof at this point unless you believe everything that Tim Yap says, which would be unfair to him quite frankly. So for now it's best to wait for official news and not to get your hopes up too much over another internet rumor that is clearly snowballing like any other meme.
Of course if you have more substantial information on this concert from a more credible source, feel free to let us know in the comments. Or you can check out our Contact page for other communication options.
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