Flo Rida, coming to KU basketball’s Late Night, goes viral with crowd-surfing baby

Rapper Flo Rida has gone viral after video emerged showing people passing him a baby aloft in a crowd while he sang at a concert in Pennsylvania over the weekend.

Yup, a crowd-surfing baby. Cue the memes.

It happened just days before the University of Kansas announced that the “Low” singer, a four-time Grammy nominee, will entertain Jayhawk fans at KU basketball’s Late Night in the Phog on Oct. 6.

A video reposted several times had racked up more than 20 million page views on X (formerly Twitter) as of Friday, ginning up strong opinions about the state of parenthood in America.

By and large, public commentary has held Flo Rida harmless in the stunt. He had not said anything publicly about the incident as of Friday morning.

According to the New York Post, Billboard and other news outlets, it happened Saturday at the CelebrateErie festival.

The video shows him sitting on someone’s shoulders in a tight scrum of bouncing fans holding cellphones aloft. When he sees the baby — it’s unclear whether the baby was already crowd-surfing at that point — he motions for the infant to be passed to him and off it goes, skimming a sea of hands.

He takes the baby, holding it in his left arm as he keeps singing into the microphone in his right hand.

At one point he puts the mic up to the baby’s mouth as though he wants it to sing along to his 2007 hit, “Low.”

It was a little too much for many folks who watched the video and worried for the child’s safety. Here’s a sampling of comments from X:

“I think this was like a street festival, but still weird to have the baby up in the front of the music without ear protection.”

“Letting all those strangers touch your baby is wild.”

“Omg? Why do people feel so comfortable bringing babies to concerts? Like so many things could go wrong in such a big crowd.”

Others mocked folks for clutching their pearls, pointing out an upside: Now that (unidentified) baby has a really cool story to tell its friends one day.

“Omg…was the baby harmed?? Oh, the humanity!!! Oh… the baby was ok and got to take an awesome pic on stage?” wrote one woman. “So many things could have gone wrong but didn’t! Shame on the parents who successfully brought their their baby to a concert & had it safely crowd surf. Shame!”

“Who the heck brought their baby to a flo rida concert. And how do they know the baby is a flo rida fan, this is unfair,” another commenter joked, wondering whether the baby really wanted to be at a Taylor Swift concert.

A second part of the video showed the baby onstage, being held high in the air by someone identified as a band member. The image made people think of the iconic scene in “The Lion King” when Rafiki holds up baby Simba.

The “GDFR” singer will appear at Late Night in the Phog, which begins at 6:30 p.m. Oct. 6 at Allen Fieldhouse in Lawrence.

This year’s event will include scrimmages by the KU men’s and women’s basketball teams, videos, dancing by the players and hype speeches by men’s coach Bill Self and women’s coach Brandon Schneider. (More details are available at kuathletics.com.)

Late Night crowds expect a little something extra mixed in with their hoops. But Flo Rida would have to parachute in through the fieldhouse roof to top the Late Night that lives in KU infamy,

In 2019 KU brought Snoop Dogg to Late Night, then later apologized when some folks didn’t appreciate the stripper poles and money guns shooting fake $100 bills.

Oh, baby.