Kanye West drops out as Rolling Loud Miami headliner one week before festival
Kid Cudi will replace West (billed these days under the name Ye) as the hip-hop festival's Friday headliner
Fans who hoped to hear cuts from Kanye West’s Donda 2 at Rolling Loud Miami this weekend will have to continue to settle for their Stem Players. Just a week before the hip-hop festival was scheduled to begin, Rolling Loud’s co-founders confirmed that West had dropped out as a headliner.
“We were looking forward to Ye headlining Rolling Loud Miami 2022,” Rolling Loud co-founders Tariq Cherif and Matt Zingler shared, per Pitchfork. “We spent months working with him and his team on the performance. Unfortunately, Ye has decided that he will no longer be performing. This is the first time a headliner has ever pulled off our show and though we don’t take it lightly, we wish him the best. We look forward to welcoming Kid Cudi as a headliner in Miami and we can’t wait to see what he has in store.”
This may be the first time a headliner has pulled out of Rolling Loud Miami, but it’s not the first time West has dropped out of a lineup last minute. He cancelled a planned headlining set Coachella 2022 just a few weeks before the big day (Coachella replaced him with a joint performance by The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia). Los Angeles-based production and design firm Phantom Labs sued West over the incident, per Variety, alleging they weren’t paid for work they put in on his planned performance.
The addition of Kid Cudi ups the ante on the statement, given Cudi and West’s very public falling out earlier this year. West took aim at Cudi on Instagram, criticizing him for his relationship with Pete Davidson (the current playboy paramour of West’s ex-wife Kim Kardashian). Cudi, in response, vowed never to work with West again and called him a “fuckin dinosaur.” Even once things cooled down, Cudi indicated that “Rock N Roll” on Pusha T’s It’s Almost Dry would be his and West’s final collaboration.
Rolling Loud Miami will run from Friday, July 22 through Sunday, July 24. Future will headline the festival on Saturday, followed by Kendrick Lamar on Sunday. The A.V. Club named Lamar’s latest, Mr Morale & The Big Steppers, one of our best albums of the first half of 2022—read the review here.