There goes Wireless. The London music festival, often described as the capital’s flagship rap weekender, has now been ignominiously cancelled after its headline act Ye was blocked from travelling to the UK.
The rapper formerly known as Kanye West was initially meant to be headlining all three nights of the event in what was billed by Ticketmaster as a “genuinely era-defining weekend residency” after an absence of more than a decade from the UK. You can certainly still consider it era-defining, though for all the wrong reasons.
For one thing, this will surely go down as the shortest-lived headline announcement in history. It’s only been eight or so days since Ye was triumphantly unveiled as the star act of the 150,000-attendee weekend in Finsbury Park. Now organisers Festival Republic will have to pay back all ticket holders. In a statement, they said: “The Home Office has withdrawn Ye’s ETA [electronic travel authorisation], denying him entry into the United Kingdom. As a result, Wireless Festival is cancelled and refunds will be issued to all ticket-holders.”
In many ways, the cancellation makes perfect sense. The American rapper has a long history of antisemitic behaviour, including praising Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Just last year, he released a song titled “Heil Hitler”, rapped about reading Mein Kampf in bed and sold $20 T-shirts bearing swastikas on his website.
Outrage had reached boiling point over Ye’s booking and Wireless’s choice of headliner looked increasingly untenable. Pepsi, Diageo and Rockstar Energy had yanked their sponsorship of the event. Jewish groups such as the Campaign Against Antisemitism called on Ye to pull out. Even speaking as an ex-fan who once battled through crowds to get up close to watch Ye at Glastonbury and Wireless back in the day, I was gobsmacked by the decision to book him. Keir Starmer, having previously labelled the festival announcement “deeply concerning”, said on Tuesday that the Grammy-winning musician “should never have been invited” to perform in the first place.
The Prime Minister is right on one thing: it should have never reached this point. The blame surely lies at the feet of Wireless organisers, who looked at Ye – and his relatively healthy streaming numbers and reliable ability to court outrage – and saw dollar signs. They didn’t make this booking in spite of Ye’s public persona; they did it because of it.
Even Festival Republic’s own managing director, Melvin Benn, described Ye’s old comments as “abhorrent” when he came out swinging to defend the Wireless booking. But, he went on in a statement made before the ban, “Ye’s music is played on commercial radio stations in this country. It is available via live streams and downloads in this country without comment or vitriol from anyone and he has a legal right to come into the country and to perform in this country”.
Yet Ye hasn’t just outraged Jewish people. He has a long history of sexism and once called slavery “a choice”. When he worked at Adidas, former employees accused him of “verbal abuse, vulgar tirades and bullying attacks”, including one incident in which he ordered a female senior designer to “make me a shoe I can f**k”. Taylor Swift described his decision to feature her as a naked sex doll in a 2016 music video as “revenge porn”. Wherever you turn, there’s probably someone that Ye has insulted or pissed off – and that includes people who actually like his music, including former fans like me. Even the most diehard Ye supporters I know conclusively tapped out after he released “Heil Hitler” last year. I know I did.
Of late Ye has tried to mend some fences, and explain that his antisemitic outbursts were an outward expression of mental ill health. In January, he took out a full-page advertisement in The Wall Street Journal attributing his “poor judgement and reckless behaviour” to his struggles with bipolar disorder.
“I lost touch with reality,” he wrote. “Things got worse the longer I ignored the problem.”
But even if you look sympathetically at his long-documented troubles with mental illness – and there are plenty who do – the road to redemption should not come easy for someone who has hurt so many. His offer to meet with members of the Jewish community ahead of Wireless should only serve as the starting point for contrition.
But Ye’s willingness – or lack of it – to change clearly didn’t factor into the decision to book him for Wireless. This is perhaps the most wince-inducing part of the whole debacle. In one poorly-judged swoop, Wireless has shown the true face of the festival business.
Music festivals – long portrayed as liberated, progressive bastions of joy and togetherness where people are brought together through the power of music – are nothing of the sort. In reality, they’re huge businesses that live and die by the sword of a single three- to four-day event every year. The need to make money means that attendees are being squeezed at every level, from skyrocketing general ticket prices to the introduction of increasingly exclusive tiered access to events.
Wireless took a gamble on Ye, imagining that the public would have forgotten – or forgiven – his antisemitism and hoping that his notoriety would bring in the big bucks. They got a Home Office ban and a costly cancellation instead. It’s hard not to feel they deserve it.
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