There's new information about why we're getting Ariana Grande, Childish Gambino and Tame Impala—but no Kanye West—as this year's Coachella headliners. Just when co-founder Paul Tollett was about to announce him in the lineup, West said that wanted to perform with a giant dome at the middle of the festival grounds instead of the main stage, according to Billboard. His collaborator John McGuire would've designed the setup.
The arrangement would force the organizers to remove a large section of portable bathrooms. When West was told it was impossible to rearrange the festival grounds to accommodate him in four months, he proclaimed he was an "artist with a creative vision who shouldn't be spending his time talking about port-a-potties." He hung up the phone on senior executives from Coachella's parent company, Goldenvoice, when he got the news.
Tollett also told Los Angeles Times about the production impasse, but he didn't go into details about the giant dome or the part-a-potties.
“He has some great [production] ideas, but we just weren't able to pull them off right now," he told Los Angeles Times. "I'd like to circle back with him and figure out a future plan of what to do with what's in his head. He's very capable of coming up with ideas that work that are pretty great. Up until Jan. 1, we were making a poster with Kanye on it. We started realizing we're probably going to have an impasse production-wise.”
TMZ reported on Jan. 2 that negotiations between West's team and the festival organizers ended with the mutual agreement to just shelve the talks altogether. “These 40x60 stages are so archaic,” a source said. “It's the same type of stage on which Shakespeare's works were performed hundreds of years ago.”
West headlined alongside Kings of Leon, Arcade Fire, and the Strokes back in 2011.
