Kanye West Cancels His Coachella Appearance When The Festival Refuses To Build Him A Custom Made Dome
Controversial rapper Kanye West is making headlines this week after he suddenly opted to back out from his planned gig at the Coachella music festival. The rapper had some conditions surrounding his performance that he failed to tell concert organizers until the last minute. Coachella co-founder Paul Tollett is expected to announce the full lineup for the 2019 desert festival this week. However, West will no longer be one of the names on the program, according to Billboard.
West was planned to be one of the major headliners of the festival, set to perform on the main Coachella stage. Although he was originally on board with the set-up, he changed his mind at the last minute and demanded a custom set be built specifically for his performance. The design he was envisioning included a massive dome constructed in the middle of the concert grounds in which he would stand during his performance. It would be built by his own set designer, John McGuire, and would incorporate a flying stage and an expensive high-tech sound system.
Kanye West pulled out of Coachella because the festival wouldn't build him a giant dome https://t.co/5fjQYJ3zED pic.twitter.com/QdVo6kkvDM
— billboard (@billboard) January 12, 2019
He did not convey his demands until days before he was to be announced as a headliner for the concert. With the festival only four months away, senior executives for Coachella said that there simply wasn’t enough time to rearrange the entire concert grounds to make room for the dome. Portable restrooms had already been set up in the place where West wanted his dome to be built and would have to be torn down. When executives explained this to West, the rapper reportedly said that as an artist with a creative vision he didn’t have the time to talk about public bathrooms.
Luckily, Tollett and the rest of his team were able to find a last minute replacement for West in the lineup. Ariana Grande will take the rapper’s place as the highly anticipated final performance of the festival. As one of the most successful artists of the past year, Coachella organizers expect Grande to be the perfect choice to save the day.
Meanwhile, West has been surprisingly quiet on social media and has not yet publicly discussed his reasoning behind his Coachella cancellation. His latest tweet written on January 1 was yet another bizarre proclamation about President Trump. Despite much public criticism, the rapper is standing by his decision to stand by Trump and his politics. “One of my favorite of many things about what the Trump hat represents to me is that people can’t tell me what to do because I’m black,” he said.
