Kanye West & Glastonbury: Haters Gonna Hate

Earlier this week Glastonbury Festival broke the news that Kanye would close out Saturday night with a set on the Pyramid stage. The event takes place June 24-28 at Worthy Farm in Pilton, England. While festival organizers said they were “very excited,” others aren’t so happy about the booking.          

The Change.org petition hopes to convince Glastonbury to kick Kanye off the lineup and replace him with a rock band. Petition author Neil Lonsdale writes, “Kanye West is an insult to music fans all over the world. We spend hundreds of pounds to attend glasto, and by doing so, expect a certain level of entertainment.” An update to the petition notes that the Eavis family, which runs the event, “do great work, but this egotistical, maniacal disgrace was a clear oversight.” As of the time of this post, the Change.org petition had collected 71,895 signatures.

Glastonbury responded to the controversy by retweeting an article from the Guardian titled “Kanye West at Glastonbury 2015: this generation’s pop provocateur won’t be boring.” The articles makes the point that although some people can’t stand Kanye, the booking should please those who’ve criticized Glastonbury’s recent choice of headliners as dull.

“Booking Kanye West to headline is not the safe option,” the Guardian writes. “Will he interrupt his set to bring the world a lengthy diatribe on his views about any of the great range of topics upon which he has opinions, as he did at the Wireless festival last year? Will he choose to play one song over and over again, as he and Jay Z did with Niggas in Paris during the Watch the Throne tour? Will he engage in some ludicrous and borderline offensive piece of staging, as he did with the Yeezus tour, which featured both the confederate flag and an appearance by Jesus, attracted the opprobrium of both the liberal left and the religious right?”

The article closes by declaring that Kanye’s set will be a “spectacle” and “the pop event of the year.”

The Independent also tackled the subject, noting that music fans also freaked out in 2008 when Jay Z was announced as the first hip hop act to headline Glastonbury. The paper pointed out that at the time, Noel Gallagher complained about the booking because of Glastonbury’s “tradition of guitar music.”

The Independent calls this a “silly” argument as times have changed and Glasto is no longer the same festival that “started as a 1,000-person pop, folk and blues festival, with free milk from the farm with every £1 ticket purchased.” Besides, Jay Z’s set was “generally hailed as a success in the end.”

Will Kanye pull off the same feat and win over the haters? Or will you sign the petition in hopes of stopping this musical injustice? Leave us a comment and let us know what you think.