Kanye West has dropped out of the Coachella music festival just over one week before it opens, TMZ and Variety reported on Monday.
The 44-year-old rapper was set to headline North America’s largest music festival for two weekends in April along with Billie Eilish, Harry Styles and the electronic group Swedish House Mafia.
There were no reported reasons for West’s cancellation, but the news comes after several weeks of publicly combative and unpredictable behavior from the rapper. In recent months, West has repeatedly lashed out at his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian, and her boyfriend, the Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson, and released a music video in which a claymation version of Davidson is kidnapped and killed.
Last month, Instagram suspended West for 24 hours after he used a racial slur to describe the TV host Trevor Noah, who called West’s harassment of Kardashian “terrifying to watch” and representative of “what so many women go through when they choose to leave” in a lengthy Daily Show segment.
After the Instagram suspension, West was barred from a performance at last night’s Grammy Awards – hosted by Noah – due to what was described as his “concerning online behavior”. A petition to remove him from the Coachella lineup had since gathered almost 50,000 signatures in recent weeks.
In February, West had also claimed he would pull out of the festival if fellow headliner Eilish didn’t apologise to Travis Scott over a perceived slight, related to the singer helping a fan during a concert. West saw it as an attack on Scott’s handling of the Astroworld disaster.
In 2016, West also cancelled the final leg of his Saint Pablo tour after several controversial and unpredictable on-stage rants; he was hospitalized for a mental health breakdown shortly thereafter.
West’s Coachella cancellation also scraps a potential appearance by rapper Travis Scott, whom West was reportedly planning to bring on stage. It would have been Scott’s first large-capacity performance since the disaster at his Astroworld festival in Houston last November, when a crowd crush killed 10 people. Scott was originally supposed to headline Coachella in 2020, delayed by Covid until 2022, but pulled out of the festival after the tragedy.
West previously headlined the Indio, California-based festival in 2011 and has not performed his own set since, though he has made surprise appearances in performances by The Weeknd in 2015 and Kid Cudi in 2019.
The Guardian has contacted representatives for both West and Coachella.
