Kid CudiPhoto: Mike Coppola (Getty Images)
This weekend’s Rolling Loud music festival got off to a, shall we say, dramatic start last night, after rapper Kid Cudi walked off stage in the middle of his set after members of the audience threw water bottles at him. According to Rolling Stone , Cudi appears to have taken at least one bottle to the face, and when he very reasonably threatened to stop the show if they “hit me with one more fucking thing,” he was met with another object thrown, at which point he dropped the microphone and walked away.
The elephant that really turned out to be in the room here is, of course, Kanye West, whose headline spot Kid Cudi took over after West pulled out of the festival last week, and their names are members. of the crowd started chanting after Cudi cleared out. Which West was probably there to hear, as it turns out he appeared on Rolling Loud anyway, doing a guest set with Little Durk in which he performed a Life Of Pablo track in which Cudi famously lines up.
West’s drama with Rolling Loud — and his maneuvering here, which allowed him to give the festival itself the middle finger while still reaping the adulation of his audience — is just a standard part of the Ye playbook at this point ; also see his Coachella treatment earlier this year. Cudi’s stuff seems to be more personal; West and his former collaborator had a falling out earlier this year over Kid Cudi’s friendship with Pete Davidson, who has spent much of the past year as the latest sun in the constellation of grievances West’s ever-present. It’s never clear, when talking about West, how much of his actions are premeditated malice, rather than just a penchant for impromptu bullshit, but it’s not hard to see last night’s Rolling Loud as an example of him getting almost everything he wanted, in the most chaotic way possible.