Young Thug, a.k.a. SEX, has canceled all performances of his upcoming Australia tour, including a scheduled concert alongside Super Slimey collaborator Future. Thug was set to play at the inaugural Sydney City Limits music festival on Saturday and headline a show in Melbourne, as well as the Future appearance on Sunday night, but the rapper was unable to secure a visa.
Live Nation Australia confirmed the news in a statement; Sydney City Limits also confirmed the news in a Facebook post. Thug was “unable to comply with the requirements for processing his Australian entry visa application and this has now made it impossible to secure visa approval in time for Young Thug to travel from the USA in time to appear at Sydney City Limits.”
Young Thug will be replaced by an Australian rapper, Tkay Maidza, at the music festival. His Melbourne show has been canceled, but the Future concert will go on anyway without him.
This isn’t the first time that Young Thug has had issues with shows in Australia. Last year, he was scheduled to perform at the Laneway Festival, but was unexpectedly dropped from the music festival before it started. That time, it appears he did have a visa but the festival organizers thought he was “unreliable.” The fest offered refunds to anyone who bought tickets after Thug had been added to the lineup.
The Laneway co-founder Danny Rogers did a Reddit AMA last year, and the very first question he chose to answer was: “Did you really expect Young Thug to show up?” His answer was long, but telling:
"Yes we did, because his management worked very hard to get all of the visa process together. Unfortunately as most of us know and saw over the past month Thugger worked to his own timelines even though we had all indications that this was a goer, when it came to the absolute finish line and us pushing back on deadlines on various things til the 11th hour that we started to realise that we might be working with an artist that might be somewhat unreliable. We made the decision ourselves to pull Thug so that we didn't get into a situation right on top of the festival that we couldn't manage the situation. It's the first time in 13 years that we've had to pull an artist so it wasn't treated lightly but we think it was the most practical outcome. We didn't think twice about offering refunds and these were surprisingly very low."
Young Thug has yet to comment on the cancellation of his Australia tour. In the meantime, we’ll just have to wait for whatever new music he’s currently sitting on.
