Saturday night (Dec. 15th) Cardi B's headlining set at the Los Angeles iteration of ROlling Loud was met with a headline-making distraction when Offset crashed the stage to put on an elaborate attempt at getting his wife back.
In the aftermath, many fans criticized the organizers of Rolling Loud for allowing such an act to take place as they reasoned that the gesture was unsolicited by the Bronx rapper and that it lessened the value of Cardi B being the festival's first female headliner.
Today, the organizers have responded, offering that they had nothing to do with what took place, nor were they entirely aware that it was taking place.
"Headliners and their teams have full control of the stage and who is allowed on it during their set at Rolling Loud," said co-founder Tariq Cherif in a statement. "The festival does not interfere with or influence a headliner’s set list. We have never and will never do anything to change a headliner's set. We were tipped off that something was going to happen, but had nothing to do with the organization or execution of it.
"Rolling Loud is proud to provide the platform for a queen like Cardi B to absolutely slay her performance. Despite the stunt, she performed hit after hit and electrified the crowd with her talent, energy, choreography, and set design. Cardi B proved herself as a top tier headliner last night, and that should be the story. We look forward to continued business with her in the future."
Many assumed the Rolling Loud management to be in on the ambush as they tweeted out various messages foreshadowing "viral" moments on the Audiomack stage that Cardi was headlining, even adding that Cardi would have "BIG surprise guests." The tweets have since been deleted, but Cherif added that the tweets were in relation to news they received about other guests, not Offset, and that the tweets were deleted when it was revealed to them that the "surprise guests" would not be in attendance.
"We were tipped off that Cardi was going to have multiple surprise guests, corroborated by what she said in her IG Live. One of specific guests we were told about didn’t end up showing up so we deleted the tweet, which is standard for us when things change as the night goes on," he notes. "For example, there’s an earlier tweet about a special surprise guest for Tyga’s set that we also deleted upon learning that it wasn’t happening. Deleting old tweets with bad intel isn’t usually alarming but once we realized that we were getting dragged for the surprise interruption, we panicked and deleted the tweet bc we knew it was going to make things look worse. In hindsight, deleting those tweets actually made us look worse. We recognize that it was a poor decision."