T-Pain fans planning to attend the "Wiscansin State Fear" event on June 13th will now need to travel to Road America near Elkhart Lake instead of the originally planned Milwaukee Mile at State Fair Park.
The change comes after a dispute between the Grammy-winning artist and Wisconsin State Fair officials over the event name and planned activities.
"Let's work together to get as many people up there to show that there was or is a desire for this thing," local event coordinator, Travis Chambers said.
Chambers owns Uptown Society, a company that organizes local events and programs.
He expressed disappointment about the details surrounding the venue change and is now working to organize transportation for Milwaukee residents wanting to attend.
"Young minorities in Milwaukee have been marginalized and they're restricted," Chambers said.
T-Pain shared his frustrations in an Instagram post on Friday, claiming fair officials objected to the event name and certain activities after initial agreements were made.
"Everything was all set, everything was ready to go—now all of a sudden when they make the announcement for Wiscansin State Fear, they said the name is not family friendly, we can't do karaoke anymore," said T-Pain.
The artist also claimed officials told him, "We can't have carnival rides because anytime they have carnival rides gangs show up—that's a weird gang culture in Milwaukee."
T-Pain, who had planned the event for the night before his annual Wiscansin Fest, questioned the decision.
"I have a key to the city. There's a T-Pain Day in Milwaukee. How am I not family friendly?" said T-Pain.
In his social media post, T-Pain showed examples of similar events that had been promoted by the fairgrounds, asking, "How come there's not gangs showing up to these things that you're promoting? Oh is it because you're doing it and not black T-Pain? Is that what it is?"
A spokesperson for the State Fair released this statement:
"We take responsibility and apologize for the way this was handled. There were missteps in internal communications that are not representative of the standard at Wisconsin State Fair Park. We were overly ambitious about what we could host and unfortunately, these missteps led to this event not coming to fruition. We are taking steps to ensure a more complete event review process is in place."
Chambers expressed skepticism about the statement saying, "How do you execute a contract, go through months of conversations and just say oh we just mis-stepped. That's not—there's no way."
Chambers has reached out to T-Pain's entertainment group to try and organize buses for people wanting to attend the relocated event at Road America in Elkhart Lake.
This story was reported by a journalist and has been converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
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