During a recent interview with Complex, Rolling Loud co-founder Tariq Cherif commented on the Rolling Loud music festival partnering with WWE, the crossover between wrestling fans and hip-hop, and more. You can check out some highlights from the interview below:
On the WWE partnership: “A lot of people on this team grew up fans of wrestling, and we love and respect what the WWE has built as far as their storylines and their brand and the way they’ve gotten this massive legion of diehard fans. They go to WrestleMania every year, and we’re building something similar over here. Granted, it’s different, but we have a lot of similarities, and we also have a lot of crossover fans. There’s a lot of hip-hop fans that are fans of wrestling. There’s a lot of wrestling fans who are fans of hip-hop. Hip-hop dominates all culture.”
On the crossover between wrestling fans and hip-hop: “It’s the No. 1 genre of music. It drives culture across all press points, from music to fashion to athletics to tech to charities. It doesn’t matter where you are, hip-hop has a major presence. So we have a lot of crossover fans thanks to hip-hop being so massive, and thanks to wrestling being so massive. We just thought it would be cool to mesh both worlds together and bring them into our world, expose them to our fans at the festival and on our stream. And we’ll be in turn exposed to their fans that tune into Fox on Friday night to watch Smackdown. It’ll be pretty cool.”
This Friday night’s episode of WWE SmackDown will feature several matches airing live from Rolling Loud Miami 2021. The company will be shooting back and forth between Cleveland, Ohio and Rolling Loud.
