The Pan American Games, held every four years in the year before the Summer Olympics, are in the Canadian city this time around and opened on July 10; the games close this coming Sunday, July 26. The Toronto Pan Am Games committee has hired as their headliner in the closing show the father of North West, rapper Kanye West.
But there is a petition out trying to prevent that, and hoping to replace him with a Canadian performer. It’s at change.org and as of this writing it has 50,269 signatures. It includes a blurb for potential signees that explains the objections to West and the hopes for a replacement:
The Toronto Pan Am games have proven to be very important for Torontonians this year and have triggered a unified sense of pride in our city. It would only be just to ask a proud Torontonian (or even a Canadian for that matter) in the music industry to perform, such as Drake, Walk Off The Earth, Feist, Metric, Shania Twain, deadmau5, Crystal Castles, Zeds Dead, The Weeknd, Peaches, K’naan, and many many more!
The options for Toronto artists are far from limited and choosing someone like Kanye West raises several concerns among the people. Why was a local artist or group not chosen and supported, just as our local athletes are throughout the games?
Toronto Pan Am Games organizing committee please reconsider your decision as we will NOT be attending Kanye West’s show.
No word from the organizing committee if they intend to dump Kanye West and replace him, which presumably would be a costly move. But the petition is growing by the minute and already, in the handful of minutes since the figure was reported above, has hit 50,301 signatures.
It’s not the first petition to target West and try to remove the controversial rapper, and husband of Kim Kardashian, from a bill. He headlined the closing show at last month’s Glastonbury Festival in England but not before a 130,000 strong petition tried, but failed, to nix him.
It seems unlikely this petition will have any more luck than the Glastonbury 2015 petition did. But, for the record, the number of signees is now at 50,331. And counting.
