Kanye Runs Into Multiple Issues During Donda 2 Premiere Event

*deep cleansing breath* Fine, let’s talk about Kanye again.

The rapper held the Donda 2 premiere experience on Feb. 22 at LoanDepot Park in Miami, featuring special guests The Game, Migos, Da Baby, Alicia Keys, Playboi Carti and other artists included on the album. And like everything surrounding him these days, the event wasn’t without controversy.

During the song “Jail 2,“ TMZ reports that West was joined on stage by DaBaby (eww) and rocker Marilyn Manson (eww). They were about to perform the track live, but Kanye had trouble with his in-ear tech and ended up throwing his mic in anger. As if that wasn’t enough, during the last song of the event, “Off The Grid,” Fivio Foreign and Playboi Carti joined Kanye for the performance, but Fivio’s mic was out of sync with the music, so he sounded like he was trying to catch up the whole time. Apparently, the issues weren’t as bad for the live crowd as they were for people watching the livestream on stemplayer.com.

As is becoming his trend, Kanye did not drop Donda 2 at midnight on 2/22/22 as many fans expected. We previously reported at The Root that the “Power” rapper announced that his new album would only be available on his streaming platform Stem Player, saying last week on Instagram, “Donda 2 will only be available on my own platform, the Stem Player. Not on Apple Amazon Spotify or YouTube. Today artists get just 12% of the money the industry makes. It’s time to free music from this oppressive system. It’s time to take control and build our own. Go to stemplayer.com now to order.”

Seriously though, are there still people expecting Kanye’s albums to drop when scheduled? Kanye has never met a deadline he couldn’t miss. Just to complete the trifecta of nonsense coming out of this event, West continued his harassment of his ex-wife Kim Kardashian by sampling her Saturday Night Live monologue. People reports that the song “Sci-Fi” began with Kim saying, “I married the best rapper of all time. Not only that, he is the richest Black man in America. A talented, legit genius who gave me four incredible kids.” On the show, that’s followed by the punchline, “So, when I divorced him you have to know it came down to just one thing…his personality.” Funny how that didn’t make it into the track.

This is the latest in a long line of messes Kanye has found himself in lately. There were the rumors he was banned from SNL, his completely made-up beef with Billie Eilish, his issues with his daughter being on TikTok, consistently threatening Kim’s boyfriend Pete Davidson and filing paperwork to halt Kim’s request for divorce.

All these stories have come up in the past few weeks. Despite all his scandals, the music has always been the one thing that keeps Kanye’s fans invested. But based on the problems that came out of the Donda 2 premiere experience, that may not be his saving grace anymore.