It seems that teaming up with Paul McCartney isn’t enough to please the thousands of rock fans who flock to Glastonbury every year.
A petition to cancel Kanye West‘s forthcoming headlining performance at the country’s historic music festival has reached more than 90,000 signatures since it was posted on Monday, March 16. The letter, written by a man named Neil Lonsdale on the website Change.org, calls West “an insult to music fans all over the world” and suggests he be replaced with a rock band.
But in an interview with NME, Lonsdale admitted he’s never actually attended the festival before, calling himself a “Glastonbury virgin.” He also said he initially started the petition as a joke, but would be “more than happy” if it was successful. The petition continues to recieve thousands of signatures every hour.
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My petition started as a joke,” he told NME, “and I never thought it would make a difference. I don’t think it would make a difference if 200,000 people signed it. Anyway, Kanye’s a big boy, I’m sure he can take a bit of banter.”
Glastonbury, the UK’s largest music festival, brings about 135,000 attendees to Worthy Farm each year, and has a history of resisting mainstream, American hip-hop. While Lonsdale stressed that his outrage is about artistry, not race, the topic has been hard to avoid given the prior Glastonbury-related petitions that boycotted Jay Z in 2008 and Beyonce in 2011. In a 2008 interview with the BBC, Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher famously sad the festival has a “tradition of guitar music” and that booking a hip-hop artist at Glastonbury was “wrong.”
“I’m sorry, but Jay Z? No chance,” he said.