SOB x RBE lose a festival set after organizers report threats to their team

SOB x RBE were dropped from the bill of the New West Coast Festival in Salt Lake City hours before they were due on stage on Saturday. The organizers of the one day event said the decision followed threats made against their team, and did not go into further detail about what those threats involved or who made them.

It would have been the second show of the group's reunion. The first came at Back 2 The Bay on August 13, and the return had been building since July, when the Vallejo rap group put out Ten Summers, their first new music together in seven years.

The split in 2019 came in a difficult year. Former member Lul G was arrested for murder that same year, and the group went their separate ways rather than continuing under the name. The reunion has been treated as a genuine event in Bay Area hip-hop, which makes a cancellation on the day sting more than a routine scheduling change.

Festivals rarely explain themselves in public, and this one gave a reason without giving specifics. What that means for the rest of the reunion is unclear: no replacement date has been mentioned, and neither the group nor the festival has said whether other bookings are affected.

Late cancellations of this kind are not rare in a year when several events have collapsed at short notice, from the LA Jazz Festival, pulled hours before it opened, to a string of headline tours abandoned without explanation such as Jason Isbell's cancelled dates. Upcoming dates for the acts we track are on the tour guide.