Watch Kanye West Get Booed by ‘60,000 People’ at a Dodgers Game
It was fitting that, at last night’s Video Music Awards, Kanye West‘s Video Vanguard Award acceptance speech did not contain a single mention of his music videos. After all, what better way to sum up a show that went so gloriously, uproariously off-script?
Instead, West used his time onstage to tilt at familiar windmills – the injustice of award shows, the exploitation of artists, the evils of Hennessy – and seemed genuinely perplexed that he’s still getting shit for storming the VMA stage and interrupting Taylor Swift way back in 2009.
“I think about [it] when I’m in the grocery store with my daughter and I have a really great conversation about fresh juice and at the end, they say, ‘Oh, you’re not that bad after all,'” he said. “It crosses my mind a little bit when I go to a baseball game and 60,000 people boo me.”
We can see why that might start to get annoying, especially since said booing took place almost four years after the Swift incident – on August 14, 2013, when West attended a Los Angeles Dodgers game with brother-in-law Rob Kardashian. When West and his crew were shown on the jumbotron, they received the business from the fans in attendance – sorry Kanye, but there were actually only 44,091 of them – to the point where his group moved to seats behind the visiting New York Mets dugout. See for yourself:
To add more salt to the wound, Robin Thicke received a far warmer welcome from the Los Angeles faithful later in the game.
West also attended Game 5 of the Western Conference Finals between the Warriors and Rockets in May, and the home crowd went from showering the likes of George Lopez with cheers to booing Kanye. But it didn’t stop him from showing face during the NBA Finals, where he crashed the Warriors’ postgame interview and did his best Stephen Curry impression.
“You know I’m extremely exhausted by the fourth,” Kanye said. “This next game, you know, we got to go hard.”
The boos extend far beyond sporting events, of course. Ladbrokes, a betting agency based in England, posted 2/1 odds of West being booed off the stage at Glastonbury earlier this year. That’s after over 130,000 people signed a petition in protest of him being the headliner. At least West is still welcomed with open arms in his hometown, Chi-City.