As legendary hip-hoppers De La Soul tour Canada, visiting some cities for the first time, their “win to get in” ticket policy is leaving some fans out in the cold.
De La is currently touring with Ivana Santilli and Paul E. Lopes on the Icebox tour, sponsored by Kool brand cigarettes. It’s impossible to buy tickets to the shows, and they can only be won on the radio, by phoning a 1-800 number or by registering on the Internet.
The catch? According to theicebox.ca, winners have to be smokers.
When asked about this, De La’s Plug One, Posdnous, said the band does private shows like that all the time, but he added that he didn’t find out about the smoking stipulation until after they’d agreed to do it.
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“Believe me, people tell me about that everywhere we go,” he said. “But whether we do something for Budweiser, and you don’t drink, or we do the High Times Festival, and you don’t smoke weed, we’ve done shows for just about everybody. As for the people who didn’t catch us this time, hopefully they can catch us next time we come around, because we almost always get invited back.”
Although it seemed that anyone who wanted badly enough to catch Wednesday’s show in Winnipeg found a way in (one fan I talked to simply walked up early in the night, asked for a ticket and was let in) there were still a few fans lingering outside complaining about the ticket policy while De La was rocking the house.
