Lanre Bakare on the UK government’s decision to revoke Kanye West’s visa after Wireless festival booked him as a headliner
When Kanye West was announced as the headliner for Wireless festival in London this summer, the backlash was immediate.
“He’d been on a campaign of four or five years of antisemitic trolling,” Lanre Bakare, the Guardian’s arts and culture correspondent, tells Nosheen Iqbal. “Embracing neo-Nazi imagery, pushing out far-right conspiracy theories about Jewish people.”
Bakare argues that Wireless “massively underestimated the strength of feeling on this”. He says: “In Britain at the minute, we’re in a moment where a lot of people are aware of how antisemitism is on the rise. We’ve obviously had the Manchester attacks, and also [the Wireless venue in] Finsbury Park is just down the road from the biggest Jewish community in the country, who’ve also been under attack recently. So there’s a heightened awareness about antisemitism.”
On Tuesday, the UK government revoked West’s visa, leading to the cancellation of Wireless. Despite being banned from the UK, Lanre maintains that West remains a commercially viable artist and that his comeback will not be entirely derailed.
“Kanye West won’t come back to the heights that we’ve seen before – but he’s not been at that level when he was at the absolute cutting edge of hip-hop and rap for a decade. Will he be booked for Coachella again? Probably not. Will he be booked for Glastonbury again? Probably not. But can he still sell out 70,000-seater stadiums in America? Absolutely.”
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