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 offstage midway through his headlining set after crowds threw water bottles at him. Per Rolling Stone, Cudi appears to have taken at least one bottle in the face, and when he very reasonably threatened to stop the show if “I get hit by one more damn thing,” he was hit with another thrown object — at the Period he dropped the microphone and walked away.
The elephant that turned out to actually be in the room here is, of course, Kanye West, whose headlining slot was taken over by Kid Cudi after West dropped out of the festival last week, and whose name members of the crowd began singing after Cudi had gone. Which West was likely to hear, as it turns out he was showing up on Rolling Loud anyway and did a guest set with Little Durk, in which he performed a Life Of Pablo track that Cudi is known to have lyrics on.
West’s drama with Rolling Loud — and his maneuver here that allowed him to give the festival a middle finger himself and still earn his audience’s admiration — is just a standard part of the Ye playbook at this point; also see his treatment of Coachella earlier this year. The Cudi stuff seems more personal; West and his former associate had a falling out earlier this year over Kid Cudi’s friendship with Pete Davidson, who has spent much of the last year as the last sun in West’s ever-present constellation of grievances. Talking about West, it’s never clear how many of his actions are preplanned wickedness – as opposed to a simple penchant for impromptu fuckery – but it’s not hard to see last night’s Rolling Loud as an example of how he can do just about anything gets what he wants in the most chaotic way possible.