Did Kanye West deserve to get booed at Bonnaroo?

What happened

Kanye West’s late night performance at the Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival over the weekend was delayed almost two hours, causing the crowd to pelt the stage with glow sticks and chant, “Kanye sucks.” West had been scheduled to hit the stage at 2:45 a.m. Sunday morning, but didn’t arrive on stage until 4:25 a.m. The delay was caused by difficulties setting up West’s elaborate stage set, and in part because Pearl Jam, who played before West, exceeded their time limit on stage. (AP)

What the commentators said

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Not only did Kanye start his show almost two hours late, said Nick Anderman in the Village Voice’s Sound of the City blog, when he finally did arrive on stage, he didn’t even offer “so much as a brief apology for the delay.” On top of that, “he spent a good chunk of the show playing his album (which everyone there had already heard, of course) over the PA system.” The crowd had every right to be angry.

Kanye doesn’t deserve all the blame for the delay, though, said Whitney Pastorek in Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch blog. Pearl Jam did play “an hour longer than scheduled.” But what is “lame” is that, after such a long delay, Kanye “went on to play for a grand total of one hour. Total. A single hour.” Who knows how much he got paid for that, but “it probably could have bought everyone” in the crowd “an Escalade and offset their carbon emissions for a year.”

But you have to give Kanye some credit, said Brian Mansfield in USA Today. Even though he was late, he still “put every ounce of his gusto into his performance, whether whirling around the stage or singing (quite well) one of his recognizable hooks: Jesus Walks, Gold Digger, The Good Life, Can’t Tell Me Nothing, Heard ’Em Say.”