Kanye West smashes microphone and storms off stage after technical difficulties at Toronto’s Pan Am Games
The rapper had been performing for 13 minutes
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The self-proclaimed “greatest living rock star” Kanye West threw his toys out the pram, or, in this case, his mic off the stage half way through a concert, cutting his headline set at Toronto’s Pan Am Games short.
Mr Kardashian was reportedly facing technical difficulties while performing a medley of hits at the closing ceremony. While in the middle of “Good Life”, the rapper decided he’d had enough and launched his microphone into the sky, storming off while it plummeted to the ground.
Dressed in all blue, the singer performed hits "Black Skinhead", "Can't Tell Me Nothing", "Touch the Sky" and "All of the Lights" to a 40,000 strong crowd, the microphone technicality coming 13 minutes into the concert. He was reportedly going to finish on ‘Gold Digger’.
Soon after the official Olympic Network for Canadians, CBC Olympics, tweeted that his microphone had cut out in the stadium but not the broadcast.
Much like with his headline slot at Glastonbury, a petition was started before the performance to try and get organisers to remove him from the bill – it was signed by 54,000 people.
The petition's author had written on Change.org: “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?”
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