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The Slovakia festival due to welcome Kanye West next week has been called off after the uproar over the US rapper’s May release of a song glorifying the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.
Before the 20 July gig was cancelled, Bratislava’s Rubicon hip-hop festival was set to be West’s only confirmed live performance in Europe this year.
Though he has won 24 Grammy awards over the course of his career, the erratic rapper has become notorious for his increasingly antisemitic and hate-filled rants.
West, who has legally changed his name to the shorthand Ye, released the song Heil Hitler on 8 May, the 80th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war. The track ends with a sample of a speech given by Adolf Hitler in 1935 in the original German, which ends with the Nazi leader calling for supporters to “stand up for me like I have stood up for you”.
The song was banned in Germany on the grounds of its extremist symbolism under hate speech laws and was removed from most mainstream streaming platforms, but proliferated and found support on Elon Musk’s X.
In the wake of the announcement of West’s appearance at Rubicon, thousands of people signed a petition against the gig, calling it “an insult to historic memory, a glorification of wartime violence and debasement of all victims of the Nazi regime”.
During the second world war, more than 70,000 Slovak Jews were put in concentration camps, turned over to German authorities and murdered.
West – a vocal supporter of the US president, Donald Trump – is “repeatedly and openly adhering to symbols and ideology connected with the darkest period of modern global history”, two groups behind the petition said.
In a statement on Instagram late on Wednesday, Rubicon organisers said the decision to cancel the event was “due to media pressure and the withdrawal of several artists and partners”.
“This was not an easy decision,” they said, without drawing a direct line between the rapper’s planned appearance and the cancellations.
Styling itself as the central European country’s premier hip-hop hang-out, the Rubicon festival was to run from 18 to 20 July. The US rappers Offset and Sheck Wes were to share top billing with West.
This month it was revealed that Australia cancelled West’s visa over Heil Hitler, in which West raps about his custody battle with his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. West’s current wife, Bianca Censori, is Australian.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
