GWAR Singer Reacts to Alleged Outrage Over Onstage ‘Murder’ of Trump & Musk Dummies Amid 1st Amendment Crisis: ‘It’s Looney Tunes’

For much than 40 years, the members of thrash metallic costumed stone radical GWAR person been schlepping their elephantine intergalactic monster costumes crossed the satellite arsenic portion of a wildly over-the-top theatrical amusement featuring the beheading and/or comically absurd disemboweling of each president from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.

The band’s fans gleefully propulsion to the beforehand of their gigs successful bid to get blasted with immoderate mode of fake bodily fluids that erupt from the towering, cartoonish dummies. But implicit the weekend, immoderate folks who seemingly conscionable discovered the band, allegedly got into a tizzy implicit 1 facet of GWAR’s existent amusement — a mock beheading of Tesla CEO and erstwhile DOGE brag Elon Musk. The tweets appeared to beryllium an effort to gin up outrage implicit the formerly uncontroversial bit, astatine a clip erstwhile Donald Trump and the president of the FCC person been sending ominous messages astir their presumption of the limits connected the First Amendment’s close to escaped speech.

“The thought that GWAR is normalizing unit is patently absurd,” pb vocalist Michael “Blöthar the Berserker” Bishop tells Billboard astir a hair-on-fire header from the New York Post tabloid earlier this week that read: “Heavy Metal Band Stage Phony Beheading of Elon Musk, Murder Trump successful Shocking Festival Performance.”

The amusement successful question was the band’s quality astatine the Riot Fest successful Chicago, which, arsenic noted above, was successful keeping with their show benignant of the past 4 decades, during which they person taken their prop chainsaws and swords to nationalist figures left, right, and center, including erstwhile Sec. of State Hillary Clinton, Justin Bieber and Pope Francis, arsenic good arsenic America’s astir caller non-Trump president, politician Joe Biden.

The Post portion was seemingly inspired by a tweet successful which idiosyncratic — credited arsenic <a href=”https://<a href=”https://ubpass.co/billboard” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”> <img src=”https://i.imgur.com/2HpFicp.png” alt=”Billboard VIP Pass” style=”max-width: 100%; height: auto; display: block;” /> @hottakekaren, which many suspected was a fake relationship — said the band’s enactment was not “edgy, it’s grotesque and reckless and normalizes unit against a existent person. This is not okay.”

Bishop was some annoyed and amazed by the alleged outrage, noting that the set person been astatine this for a agelong clip — and that GWAR has ever been, similar punk stone successful galore ways, “chaotic and indecipherable” successful its politics. “We’re not millionaires that are acrophobic of what radical are going to accidental erstwhile they spot what we do,” helium says, questioning if the tweets allegedly denigrating the set were posted by existent humans with a bony to prime oregon bots. “Yeah, it pissed maine off! We’re a radical of artists that makes art, and it’s truly the thought that what we person done is normalizing violence… there’s thing mean astir the unit that goes connected astatine a GWAR show. It’s a cartoon, it’s Looney Tunes.”

The fake blood-spurting bits are the mode they are for a reason, helium says: due to the fact that the set doesn’t privation radical to spot what their doing and deliberation of it arsenic a realistic depiction of violence. “It’s a parody of violence,” Bishop says of the seven-foot-tall Musk puppet successful a DOGE garment who got his prop caput lopped disconnected — in a costume the vocalist says is often switched retired to correspond whoever the set says it does based connected the communicative they’re telling connected that medium cycle. “It’s trying to marque unit into a spectacle and amusement humanity’s implicit absurdity. That’s what GWAR is, it’s absurdism. To accidental it’s normalizing unit is truly reaching.”

And portion it’s thing new, the header came successful the midst of the nationalist statement implicit ABC pulling Jimmy Kimmel disconnected the aerial past week, aft the precocious nighttime big made a gag related to the sidesplitting of blimpish activistic Charlie Kirk. The gag resulted successful Nexstar, which owns much than 2 twelve ABC-affiliated stations, saying they were going to yank Kimmel’s amusement indefi...