Warning: This article contains violence and abusive language.
Week two of Warped Tour has passed us and The Dickies managed to muck up their name when they went from punk to predatory during their live set in front of thousands of people. After being called out for the disgusting behavior, lead singer Leonard Graves Phillips decided to take things from bad to worse.
During the rock band’s set, Phillips “joked” about how he loved teenage girls, and wanted to snort Viagra off their asses. One audience member in the front row spoke up and held up a poster saying “Teen girls deserve respect, not gross jokes from disgusting old men! Punk shouldn’t be predatory!” Phillips took the opportunity to go on a huge misogynistic rant, calling out the audience member who only wrote what everyone else was thinking.
He said, “Kiss it, ya bitch! I have fucked farm animals that were prettier than you, you fucking hog.” The then instructed the crowd to chant “BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME! BLOW ME!” He finished off 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!”
Instead of apologizing for the incident, they posted a half-ass hearted statement to Facebook kind of showing they were sorry, but also kind of showing they probably would’ve done it again.
“I finally let my anger get the better of me. I let her know what I thought of her ageist, nasty, Leonard-hating behavior. I used very rude language. I understand the word ‘cunt’ is inflammatory and that many women have been abused by this word. I should have called her an ‘asshole.’
It wasn’t my proudest moment … but neither was the time I urinated on the audience. I wasn’t there to ‘prey’ on anyone’s child. In all honesty, as fine as most of my audiences are, I’ll pass on having oral sex with each and every one of them.”
Naturally, the curator of Warped Tour Kevin Lyman sided with the general public and Tweeted it “was a very unfortunate incident and the tour does not condone this at all, they will no longer be on the tour.”
Several punk rock bands in the industry are defending Phillips by using the free speech argument and rejecting safe spaces, including Eagles of Death Metal frontman Jesse Hughes and the Offspring guitarist Noodles. Hughes said that rock and roll was about being able to say “whatever the fuck you want!” and defined a safe space as “a place that exists in your home not at the place you voluntarily drive to and walk into and sit in an audience of that exists in a public place.”
Noodles also scoffed at the idea of a safe place, and said “It takes some real guts to demand a ‘safe space’ where nobody really wants or expects one to be, even though it really is a pretty goddamn safe place to begin with.” He finished his statement with “fuck you, kiss my ass, blow me, blow me, blow me, you fat fucking cunts and assholes.”
The Dickies are a pop punk band who formed in the late 70’s in Los Angeles. They’re the type of bad who would normally perform at Warped Tour, a major tour containing a lineup of rock and pop punk bands who go across the country performing in different cities. This year’s tour started in Seattle, WA and will hit a total of 41 cities before ending in Pomona, CA this August.
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