Earlier this week, long-running California punk outfit the Dickies proved themselves to be little more than attention-starved edgelords when their frontman Leonard Grave Phillips launched into a disgusting onstage rant at the Warped Tour. Now War on Women singer Shawna Potter has weighed in with a lengthy op-ed.
Writing for Noisey, Potter has shared a piece calling out Phillips for the inherent misogyny in his rant.
For the uninitiated, the Dickies had apparently spent their full stint on the Warped Tour making lewd jokes about hoping to have sex with underage attendees. According to the Noisey post, an acquaintance of Potter's decided to hold up a sign that said, "Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men! Punk shouldn't be predatory!"
This sign is what prompted Phillips to launch his lengthy, expletive-laden rant — a rant which he almost sort-of apologized for afterward.
Here's Potter's take on the rant:
"Kiss it, ya bitch! I have fucked farm animals that were prettier than you, you fucking hog," he shouted on the mic, his words traveling past the crowd, over the field. This elicited some laughs from the audience, who he then led in a chant of: "BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME!" before wrapping up with: "How does it feel? To get shouted away, you cunt? C.U.N.T. Can you spell? You're a fat cunt. Fuck you!"
A video of the rant started circulating online, but it only showed part of it. It went on for over a minute, and was delivered in front of kids as young as 12, teens, families, and an evenly mixed gender audience.
Potter adds that the rant made Phillips seem an awful lot like a Trump supporter:
The anger that erupted in Phillips is always under the surface of men like this, even beneath their onstage characters. They do not like being challenged in any way, especially by women. And they definitely don't equate their right to free speech with anyone else's. In fact, they see others' right to free speech as an affront to their own, and in this case, one to be met with anger and hate. That's not punk. Maybe it used to be. Maybe "fucking shit up" at all costs was exciting and revolutionary in the conservative Reagan era. But now we have Trump, and while the white dudes in power are still conservative, they also look just like the Dickies or Phillips. Bands like this often look and sound exactly like the people they're rallying against—those who hate women and queers and people of color and refugees and people with physical and mental challenges, and they sound just like them to us.
Read her full post here.
Writing for Noisey, Potter has shared a piece calling out Phillips for the inherent misogyny in his rant.
For the uninitiated, the Dickies had apparently spent their full stint on the Warped Tour making lewd jokes about hoping to have sex with underage attendees. According to the Noisey post, an acquaintance of Potter's decided to hold up a sign that said, "Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men! Punk shouldn't be predatory!"
This sign is what prompted Phillips to launch his lengthy, expletive-laden rant — a rant which he almost sort-of apologized for afterward.
Here's Potter's take on the rant:
"Kiss it, ya bitch! I have fucked farm animals that were prettier than you, you fucking hog," he shouted on the mic, his words traveling past the crowd, over the field. This elicited some laughs from the audience, who he then led in a chant of: "BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME!" before wrapping up with: "How does it feel? To get shouted away, you cunt? C.U.N.T. Can you spell? You're a fat cunt. Fuck you!"
A video of the rant started circulating online, but it only showed part of it. It went on for over a minute, and was delivered in front of kids as young as 12, teens, families, and an evenly mixed gender audience.
Potter adds that the rant made Phillips seem an awful lot like a Trump supporter:
The anger that erupted in Phillips is always under the surface of men like this, even beneath their onstage characters. They do not like being challenged in any way, especially by women. And they definitely don't equate their right to free speech with anyone else's. In fact, they see others' right to free speech as an affront to their own, and in this case, one to be met with anger and hate. That's not punk. Maybe it used to be. Maybe "fucking shit up" at all costs was exciting and revolutionary in the conservative Reagan era. But now we have Trump, and while the white dudes in power are still conservative, they also look just like the Dickies or Phillips. Bands like this often look and sound exactly like the people they're rallying against—those who hate women and queers and people of color and refugees and people with physical and mental challenges, and they sound just like them to us.
Read her full post here.