Cardi B To Headline Made In America Festival

This year’s Made in America festival, the Labor Day weekend music festival founded back in 2012 by Jay-Z, will be headlined by Cardi B and Travis Scott, the organizers announced Tuesday on Twitter.

A tweet from the festival’s account announced Cardi and Scott as the headliners, with the second line listing Juice WRLD, James Blake, Kaskade, Anderson.Paak and the Free Nationals, Kodak Black, Bazzi, Jorja Smith, Blueface, and Pink Sweats. The festival is set to take place on August 31 and September 1.

The first Made in America festival took place in 2012, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, with Ron Howard making a 2013 documentary, also called Made in America, about the inaugural festival. The festival added a second location of Los Angeles in 2014, but that experiment ended after only one year.

The festival, per BillyPenn, was originally not set to take place in 2019, after it lost its major sponsor, Budweiser. But Mayor Jim Kenney later reached an agreement with Jay-Z’s company, Roc Nation, to keep Made in America in the city, per Philadelphia Magazine.

For his trouble, Kenney was subject to a skit in January’s Mummer’s Parade, in which an actor playing Jay-Z walked an actor playing the mayor like a dog. The bit drew fire when some assumed the “Jay-Z” actor was in blackface, but it turned out the actor was actually African-American, according to Philly Voice.

Jay-Z and Pearl Jam headlined the first Made in America festival, with Beyonce and Nine Inch Nails doing the same at the second one. The likes of Rihanna, Kanye West, Coldplay, and Kings of Leon played other years, which led some social media users to grumble that this year’s lineup is underwhelming.

“I hope there’s a lot more because… this [expletive] is lacking dawg,” the first Twitter reply to the festival’s post said.

Cardi B, this year’s show’s headliner, has been in the news recently after a years-old video surfaced, in which she admitted that she used to drug and rob men in her pre-fame days.

“I never claim to be perfect or come from a perfect world wit a perfect past I always speak my truth, I always own my [expletive],” the rapper said in a statement she tweeted on March 26.”I never glorified the things I brought up in that live [sic] I never even put those things in my music I’m not proud of it and I feel a responsibility not to glorify it.”