One week after the organizers of New York City’s annual SummerStage concert series canceled R&B singer Kehlani’s Pride show set for the end of June, it appears Chicago rapper Noname’s show celebrating Juneteenth has been canceled as well. Local publication Hell Gate first reported that Noname’s show had been canceled after finding that the Ticketmaster site promoting the show announced a cancellation by the organizers. The cause is unclear.
Previously, City Parks Foundation, the nonprofit that puts on SummerStage, announced that they had decided to cancel Kehlani’s performance after Mayor Eric Adam’s office warned them of “safety concerns” regarding an earlier decision by Cornell University to bar Kehlani as well. University president Michael I. Kotlikoff accused Kehlani of having “espoused antisemitic, anti-Israel sentiments in performances, videos, and on social media.” Kehlani, who has supported Palestinians as Israel’s war against Hamas causes mass casualties and starvation, responded to the accusations, saying “I am not antisemitic nor am I anti-Jew,” and “I am anti-genocide, I am anti the actions of the Israeli government, I am anti an extermination of an entire people, I’m anti the bombing of innocent children, men women… that’s what I’m anti.”
The description of Israel’s reprisals in Gaza after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, 2023, as genocide has been highly contentious. Humanitarian groups including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have used that term, as have many others; former president Joseph R. Biden and the American Jewish Committee, among other groups that support Israel, have strongly objected to this framing.
In addition to citing the “controversy” at Cornell, the Mayor’s office cited “the security precautions needed for an event like this in Central Park, and the security demands throughout the City for other Pride events during this same period of time.” Mayor Adams himself said “antisemitism” was an issue when asked about the cancellation in a press conference on May 6. “Well, listen, everyone knows my feeling about the increase in antisemitism throughout the country and if not throughout the globe,” he said.
However, in the case of Noname’s show, the Mayor’s Office told Hell Gate that it didn’t have a hand in the cancellation, and referred the publication to Live Nation, who did not respond to their request for comment.
Reps for Live Nation, Ticketmaster, City Parks Foundation, Noname, and Kehlani did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone‘s requests for comment.
Noname has been outspoken about her socialist-leaning politics, telling Rolling Stone, “I could be a better organizer. I could be more anti-capitalist, more anti-imperialist, I could be more active politically in my community. It’s probably impostor syndrome, it’s probably a lot of things, but I just feel like with the state of the world, we all should be doing more.” She runs Noname Book Club and the Radical Hood Library in Los Angeles, both promoting community service, anti-carcerality, and justice-oriented literature by authors of color. The Book Club’s monthly picks have included Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferfuson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi and Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd’s Rifqa on his family’s history of displacement by Israeli forces.