Photo : Roy Rochlin ( Getty Images )

Good news for anybody sick of watching Kanye West act like the world’s worst political pundit, and who just wish he’d get back to his roots of being the world’s most obnoxious musical diva, instead: The Ye rapper was apparently all set to be the big headlining name at this year’s Coachella festival, but pulled out of the event at the last minute after they refused to build him a dome.


This is per a Billboard report, which notes that the festival was hours away from naming West as one of its 2019 headliners last week , when he suddenly balked at their unwillingness to construct a private performance space for his intended set. According to the report, the dome would have supposedly been big enough to house a decent fraction of the 125,000 or so fans the festival pulls in every year, and “West would play in the center…in an in-the-round format, and the dome would be tricked out with high-tech production and immersive video.”

This is, in fact, the second time Yeezy has parted ways with a festival because they wouldn’t let him get his Buckminster Fuller on; he made a similar demand of New York’s Governors Ball, only to be similarly rebuffed. Coachella’s reasons for turning down West’s demands seem pretty straightforward: A dome would be expensive, incredibly difficult to build by April, and would eat up a ton of space already reserved for portable bathrooms. West was apparently extra-annoyed that toilets were getting in the way of his dreams—and really, is there anything more Kanye than to be so obsessed with his own shit that he can’t spare a thought for the shits of others?—and complained that Coachella’s main stage wasn’t big enough for the kind of show he wanted to pull off. Festival organizers fairly responded with “Well, it wasn’t too small for Beyoncé, dude,” at which point talks appear to have broken down.


Confident that it’ll sell out whether it’s got Kanye on its side or not, the festival was happy to walk away, dialing up Ariana Grande (who’s managed by West’s former representative, Scooter Braun) to take his place. They had to do something similar by subbing in Tame Impala for Justin Timberlake, too, although that had less to do with demands for improbable semi-circular shapes, and more with the ways Timberlake’s recently rescheduled touring gigs conflicted with Coachella’s calendar and exclusivity clauses.