Two nights in Tampa Bay, then one in San Antonio. Those were the Kanye West dates that two elected officials, a few weeks apart, wanted scrubbed from the calendar.
Florida Sen. Rick Scott went first, urging the Tampa Sports Authority to cancel West’s concerts at Raymond James Stadium. Then San Antonio Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones took aim at the July 4 show at her city’s Alamodome. “I support canceling the @kanyewest concert,” she wrote, adding that “Military City USA should not host someone with a record of hate speech and antisemitic comments in a city-funded facility like our Alamodome”. Not ever, she said, and certainly not on the nation’s 250th birthday. “Standing up to antisemitism is exactly what it takes to achieve a more perfect Union,” she wrote.
A tour that keeps losing dates
West’s tour had already been chewed up by his history. In April, London’s Wireless Festival, which he was due to headline in Finsbury Park, cancelled this year’s event after the British government refused his visa. Shortly afterwards a planned concert in Poland was called off, in connection with his antisemitic comments and praise of Nazism.
The apology he has offered has not cleared the road. Yet he has still played Turkey, the Netherlands, Georgia and SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California this year.
Neither Scott’s objections nor the mayor’s had changed the schedule when Rolling Stone reported the story. West remained booked for Tampa Bay on June 26 and 28 and for San Antonio on July 4.
