Problem 1: Not a Popular Choice for a Headliner
The first to react were activists from Peace for Ukraine and Cities for Democracy who started a petition against Ye’s performance for his history of antisemitic and extremist posts. At the time of writing, the petition received more than 6000 signatures.
The activists were asking the municipality and mayor of Bratislava to stop Ye from performing at the festival. They brought up his May release song titled “Heil Hitler”, his sale of swastika t-shirts in Germany as the only available products and provocative posts on social media, “normalizing the language and symbols of war evil, which Europe – including Slovakia – refuses for many decades.”
Kanye’s posts on X from February 2025, Source: X
Municipalities are also not happy, as they received the permit requests from Rubicon organizers very last-minute compared to the standard times for such notices. Members of the city council of one of the city neighborhoods that would be affected by the festival also complained about problems with infrastructure and impact on the life of citizens. Another problem is parking. Even if the fields were cut off, there is a danger of harmful liquids penetrating the soil. The nearby standing Volkswagen factory already announced that they will not provide parking spaces.
Problem 2: The Venue is a Wheat Field
The problems continue with the venue – which Slovak journalists found to be a field with growing wheat, 3 weeks before the festival. Slovak rappers Samey and Gleb already announced that in the end they will not be performing at the festival.
The exact location was only revealed briefly on the website of, the only map was at a ticket sale web Ticketportal but after journalists from Dennik N published their findings and photos from an empty field, even this map disappeared. A crowd control security expert said that preparation should have started already at least a week ago and would need a staff of 200 people to make it.
Map available for a brief time on the ticket selling website. Source: Dennik N
Problem 3: Tickets’ Prices Going Down
At first, this might sound like good news, however, not if you are one of the people that bought premium tickets for 200 euros, while later they were on sale for 140. Most recently, the sale of tickets on the portal stopped altogether.
Organizers wanted to compensate for the price difference by giving extra free tickets to the people who bought the more expensive ones and argued that because of a new sponsor, they could afford to make the tickets cheaper.
Will it Happen?
People on social media already called it the Slovak Fyre festival, an infamous festival flop from the US in 2017. It gave way for people of the internet to get creative and came up with memes to portray Kanye West performing in the field, or waiting for the organizers to build him one.
“They announced a new headliner of Rubicon festival”, Source: Slovak satirical Instagram account @zomri
A promised announcement by organizers on July 3 never came. For now, it is unsure whether and in what form will the Rubicon festival take place. Rubicon asked the ticket seller to stop the ticket sales, who is currently waiting for further instructions and one of the organizers quit.