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Akon Show Canceled After Stage Collapses
This time Akon was nowhere near the stage when the drama occurred.
A free concert featuring the hip-hop star at Emory University in Atlanta was canceled Thursday afternoon after part of the outdoor stage collapsed during construction, injuring three people, two of them seriously, according to DeKalb County officials.
"It's probable that the weight of the lighting may have contributed to the canopy falling," DeKalb County Fire Captain Eric Jackson told Atlanta's WXIA-TV. "In the midst of trying to prepare to get everything ready—specifically to perform a sound check, is when the canopy that is on this temporary stage collapsed."
Akon, who was to headline the school's annual Fall Band Party, was not there at the time.
The accident occurred at about 5:15 p.m., after which police cordoned off the area near the Student Activity and Academic Center on Emory's Clairmont Campus. Fire trucks and ambulances arrived at the scene and the injured were taken to a nearby hospital.
"There's still a lot of equipment out there, and because of the instability of the structure of the stage and the collapse of the awning, we did not want to start disassembling that before our inspectors as well as the inspectors from Emory had a chance to take a look at that and determine just how it needed to be brought down," Jackson said.
There's no word yet on whether the Emory show will be rescheduled.
The cancellation must have come as a major disappointment to the 1,200-some students who were planning on attending the Fall Band Party, which is put on by the Student Programming Council and in past years has featured Spoon, Everclear and Jurassic 5.
"We increased the budget and felt like we should go for something big," event chair Jaclyn Freeman told the Emory Wheel, the university's main newspaper, last week. "It seems like Akon has been received well from a diverse group of students."
And Akon's built-in marquee appeal made promoting the event relatively simple, in terms of getting people to turn out.
"Akon is a big act. It sells itself. As far as event planning goes, we have it under control," Freeman said.
And presumably security would have been tight around the stage, which has been the scene of more than one questionable moment for the Konvicted rapper.
Akon came under fire in June for hurling a teenage boy off of the stage during a concert in Fishkill, New York, just seconds after he seemingly invited him to join him—a questionable move on Akon's part that of course made the rounds online.
No charges were ever filed and witnesses told the local paper that it appeared as if Akon was confronting the teen because he had hurled something at the stage.
But, the incident occurred barely two months after the Senegalese-American singer was taped engaging in a sexually suggestive dance with a girl who turned out be only 15—and a pastor's daughter, no less—during a show in Trinidad.
Despite the public apologies that ensued—from Akon, for any offense or pain he may have caused his fans or the Trinidadian community; and from the girl, who wasn't even old enough to be in the 18-and-over club—Verizon dropped him as a featured artist in May and withdrew its sponsorship from Gwen Stefani's Sweet Escape tour, for which Akon was the opening act.
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