SunFest officials approached rap star Kendrick Lamar before his curtain-closing performance last night and asked nicely that he keep his show relatively clean because, they told him, families with young children would be present for the fireworks that followed.
Obviously, their pleas fell into deaf ears.
For nearly an hour and half, the singer of Let me be me and Look Out For Detox peppered the crowd of 15,000 by some estimates with f bombs, n bombs, c bombs and m bombs in numbers that may have never been seen in the 31-year history of SunFest — despite top rap acts over the years that included Ludacris, Snoop Dogg and Wiz Khalifa.
Needless to say, thousands of residents of the downtown West Palm Beach towers that surround the main stage heard Lamar too!
“Obviously, we not happy about Kendrick Lamar’s performance,” said Melissa Sullivan, the festival’s publicist. “We need to find a better to vet people like him. Sometimes, when we ask some of the artists to keep it clean, they use profanities in higher numbers just because we asked.
“Once they get on stage, God knows what happens.”
The manager of the Compton, Calif., rapper didn’t respond to a request for comment.
And in SunFest’s first comments about the violence that also accompanied Lamar’s show, including one stabbing and two arrests, Sullivan defended the festival’s security.
“It’s our first stabbing ever,” she said. “We feel badly for the gentleman and we wish him the best.”
As for criticism from West Palm Beach Police Chief Vince Demasi that Lamar’s show should’ve been scheduled for another night, Sullivan said it wasn’t organizers’ choice to have him Sunday.
“Sometimes, we have no options,” she said. “That’s show business. Routing doesn’t allow us to schedule some of these. Train couldn’t come on any other day than Thursday. Smashing Pumpkins couldn’t have come if it hadn’t been Wednesday.”
