Kanye West Heads to Putin’s Russia After Humiliation in Europe
Bellocqimages/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images Kanye West’s travel bans have forced the rapper into Russia.
West, known for his antisemitic outbursts and peddling of Nazi paraphernalia, has faced extensive backlash to his scheduled performances in Europe this year.
He’s now resorted to performing in Putin’s Russia, according to The Guardian, and will be the most well-known Western act to perform in the country since the start of the Ukraine war.
The rapper, now known as Ye, is scheduled to perform on October 10th and 11th at St.
Petersburg’s Gazprom Arena.
Despite conservative activists’ efforts to block Western influence on its culture, the most expensive tickets to the rapper’s show, priced around $1,850, sold out almost immediately after their release on Monday, the site reported.
Cheaper tickets were the last to go, but also sold out swiftly, with all seats sold by Tuesday morning.
West’s foray into the country follows a steady stream of rejections from European countries where he’d hoped to perform earlier this year.
In April, London’s largest music festival, the U.K.’s Wireless Festival, announced West as its headliner for each of its three-night concert series.
The announcement cost the festival several major sponsors: Pepsi, PayPal, Rockstar, and Diego.
He had previously tried to distance himself from his track release, “ Heil Hitler, ” and his online shop selling swastika T-shirts by apologizing in a full-page spread in the Wall Street Journal .
West blamed head trauma from a car accident and his bipolar-1 diagnosis for his embrace of Nazi imagery in January.
“One of the difficult aspects of having bipolar type-1 is the disconnected moments—many of which I still cannot recall—that lead to poor judgment and reckless behavior that oftentimes feels like an out-of-body experience,” he wrote in the long-winded statement.
He added, “I regret and am deeply mortified by my actions in that state, and am committed to accountability, treatment, and meaningful change.
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