Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash Festival 2023 Lineup Has Playboi Carti, Kid Cudi, Future, “A Very Special Chicago Guest”

Lyrical Lemonade’s Summer Smash Festival 2023 Lineup Has Playboi Carti, Kid Cudi, Future, “A Very Special Chicago Guest”

Lyrical Lemonade, the blog and media company founded by the big-deal music-video director Cole Bennett, has been putting on its Summer Smash festival in Chicago for the past few years, and this year’s lineup has just dropped. You could look at Summer Smash as a mini-Rolling Loud, a place where young and mosh-happy rap fans can go see their favorite insurgent acts without worrying about any dusty relics trying to recapture attention. This year, the fest has Kid Cudi, Future, and Playboi Carti as headliners. Like Rolling Loud, all three days also list big acts in the “special guest” spot: $UICIDEBOY$, Lil Uzi Vert, and “a very special Chicago guest.”

The mystery Chicago guest is fun to speculate about, since there are so many candidates. Like: It probably won’t be Kanye West, right? It’s possible, but it’s hard to imagine. It could be Chance The Rapper, another hometown star with a different kind of damaged reputation, but that doesn’t seem too likely, either. Lil Durk, a Chicago star who has a hard time announcing Chicago shows without police pushback, would seem to be the obvious pick. But it would be pretty amazing if Chief Keef somehow popped up onstage for his first Chicago performance, in, what, a decade?

The rest of the Summer Smash bill features plenty of other big names, including Vince Staples, Ice Spice, GloRilla, Freddie Gibbs, Rico Nasty, Juicy J, BabyTron, Ski Mask The Slump God, BabyTron, NLE Choppa, G Herbo, Lil B, Tee Grizzly, Cordae, Trippie Redd, Central Cee, Lucki, Luh Tyler, Lil Skies, and Valee. The show goes down 6/23-25 at Bridgeview’s SeatGeek Stadium, a new venue for this fest and you can find all the details here.

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