Kanye Fills In For Drake At Wireless Festival
Kanye West stepped in for Drake at this weekend’s Wireless Festival in London after Drake had to pull out due to an illness that made him “not physically fit to fly or deliver the performance [his] fans expect and deserve.” Kanye, who had headlined the festival the previous night, played through pretty much the exact same set, save for a short interlude at the beginning in which he acknowledged the fallen Toronto rapper by running through a few seconds of popular Drake songs, like that annoying kid at a party who suffers from severe musical ADD. Drake’s crowd wasn’t having it. Later in the show, while Ye was going on about how he wants to be a good father, the audience erupted in a chorus of “We want Drake! We want Drake!” Kanye seems pretty unfazed, but does go silent for a few moments before unintelligibly cooing through Autotune and then shouting, “Who out here feels like they awesome?” Oh well. Watch all that below and some choice cuts from Kanye’s rant the previous night.
The night before, during Ye’s actual headlining set, he went on a long rant that treaded the same ground he usually does, touching on how hard fame is and how tough the media is on him all while telling the audience to believe in themselves:
That’s why I got this fucking mask on, cuz I ain’t worried about saving face. Fuck my face! Let’s set ‘em off. Pause. Now they finally got a headline. But fuck whatever my face is supposed to mean! Fuck whatever Kanye is supposed to mean! It’s about my dreams. It’s about everybody’s dreams. It’s about creating. It’s not about the idea of being a fucking celebrity, it’s not about the idea of a black man trying to do fashion and shit. Cuz these walls that I break down, [Auto-Tune on] these walls that I break down and we will. [Auto-Tune off]
You can watch the 15-minute long speech below or read it courtesy of some poor intern who had to transcribe the whole thing over at Vulture.
If you want to see a Kanye rant of your very own, Ye is headlining Outside Lands and Made In America in August and the Yeezus tour rolls through Australia in September.
UPDATE: Here’s the Night 2 rant.
[Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty.]