So, if you look back enough, you can see that Lupe Fiasco isn’t very gung-ho on the Obama campaign (or really much of modern politics for that matter). So, he was performing at Hamilton Live in Washington, D.C., and during his show kept repeating a verse containing the below lyric from his song ‘Words I Never Said’:
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say shit
That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either
After about 30 minutes of this, he was then removed from stage. Check out some tweets from Josh Rogin at the bottom of the post…the organizers also spoke on the matter:
StartUp RockOn is all about startups helping startups. At Sunday night’s Inauguration Celebration at the Hamilton Live, organizers set out to honor innovative visionaries with grants, accolades and a party worthy of the success we achieved at the RNC and DNC this summer.
Lupe Fiasco performed at this private event, and as you may have read, he left the stage earlier than we had planned. But Lupe Fiasco was not “kicked off stage” for an “anti-Obama rant.” We are staunch supporters of free speech, and free political speech. This was not about his opinions. Instead, after a bizarrely repetitive, jarring performance that left the crowd vocally dissatisfied, organizers decided to move on to the next act.
The party continued as planned, and we celebrated the announcement of CodeNow’s winning the Grant Challenge. CodeNow is a non-profit startup based in Washington DC that teaches “underrepresented high school students basic skills in computer programming.
Lupe Fiasco just got thrown off stage here at the Hamilton Live after he went on an anti-Obama diatribe mid set.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) January 21, 2013
So Lupe played one anti-war song for 30 min and said he didn’t vote for Obama and eventually was told to move on to the next song.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) January 21, 2013
Lupe refused to move to the next song so a team of security guards came on stage and told him to go.
— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) January 21, 2013