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What the pop papers say: Glasto clear way for Ted Nugent in 2015
As part of the preview to the Glastonbury festival (or rather its preview of its preview), this week's NME asks a ginger question about how James Hetfield, the bear-slaughtering bastard, is headlining.
Emily [Eavis] refuses to be drawn in.Glastonbury - which once advertised itself as "the CND festival", which raises funds for campaigning groups Greenpeace and Oxfam - can't "get involved in other people's politics".
"I don't really want to get involved with it, in terms of official comments," she says. "Every year we have people campaigning. Last year we had Tyler, The Creator; we had Beyonce anti-fur; we had Jay-Z and guns; we have this. We can't get involved in other people's politics, if we did that we'd rule out most bands in the world."
Given this willingness to turn a blind eye to people's politics, you wonder if there's anyone Glastonbury would rule out. James Hetfield's NRA buddy Ted Nugent? Will Macht Und Ehre at last get their big chance on The John Peel Stage?
Obviously, Glastonbury has long since ceased to be about a group of people with shared values getting together, but this year feels different again. It's the first time they've ever gone "look, we don't care about what people think, and given we've already done a homophobe we're unlikely to worry about who we give a platform to in the future."
2 comments:
Or that the Eavises are livestock farmers, and hence probably aren't that sympathetic to animal liberationist arguments that managed hunting of wild animals is so morally unacceptable that anyone who does it deserves to be boycotted?
That would be an understandable position (it's bollocks, of course - 'managed hunting of wild animals' isn't the same thing as charging gurning plutocrats thousands of dollars so they can get their jollies shooting animals which are already under pressure thanks to climate change, but it's a view.)
Michael Eavis is a big supporter of hunting; he was a supporter of the vindictive and pointless badger cull. I wouldn't be surprised if he believed it was necessary to import rich people onto Kodiak Island to shoot bears in order to protect the dairy industry.
The Eavises could have said something along those lines.
The trouble is, they didn't say that, did they? It was a simpering 'ooh, we don't want to comment on people's politics because bear hunting and homophobia are pretty much the same thing and personal choices'. Which just isn't good enough.
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