Lupe Fiasco was escorted off the stage by security in Washington, D.C. on Sunday after insulting President Barack Obama and performing an antiwar song during an inauguration-themed show.
The Chicago native was booked to headline the StartUp RockOn concert to celebrate the president’s re-election.
However, according to Politico the rapper was “repeating politically charged lyrics for an unusually long time.”
Josh Rogin, a writer at Foreign Policy tweeted about the event:
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
This is not the first time the 30-year-old rapper has spoken out against Obama.
In a June 2011 interview on CBS News’ “What’s Trending,” he said: “To me, the biggest terrorist is Obama in the United States of America.”
Fiasco made his position against the president clear again in July of 2012 when he told Philadelphia’s Power 99: “On one hand you have someone who is a great speaker, but kills little children, our president.”
The rapper addresses political themes in many of his songs, including “Words I Never Said.”
In the video, taken at the inaugural concert, he is performing part of that song in which he raps: “Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist. Gaza Strip was getting bombed, Obama didn’t say sh*t. That’s why I ain’t vote for him, next one either.”
The inaugural concert incident begs the question, why was someone as openly hostile to the president as Fiasco even booked to perform?
“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 concert’s organizer StartUp RockOn explained in an official statement released earlier this morning on HyperVocal.
Lupe Fiasco deleted his Twitter account on January 17th and has yet to publicly comment on the incident.
Follow Carrie Healey on Twitter @CarrieHeals.