It was only after leaving the stage in Sydney that Tenacious D member Kyle Gass learnt that these days, there is no such thing as a throwaway comment. Having been delivered a surprise on-stage birthday cake, he was asked by his bandmate, Jack Black, what he might want for his birthday. Gass replied quickly: “Don’t miss Trump next time” – a reference to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump the previous day.
Social media convulsed. Gass was promptly dropped by his agent. One Australian politician called for the band’s immediate deportation. In a statement, Black, also a Hollywood actor, declared himself “blindsided” by the comments. He announced the cancellation of the remainder of Tenacious D’s tour and said that all future creative plans for the band were now on hold. “I would never condone hate speech or encourage political violence,” he said. Gass duly followed suit, apologising for his “severe lack of judgement”.
In these rather fevered times, the risk of liberal public figures voicing political opinions has never seemed more pronounced. One needs only consider the remonstration of Gary Lineker (for criticising the government’s immigration policy), the resignation of Carol Vorderman (for labelling the government “vile”) and the rebuke of David Tennant (for saying he would prefer to live in a world in which “Kemi Badenoch doesn’t exist any more”). Although the repercussions have not been too serious for these stars, such statements can, as Kyle Gass is discovering, prove career-rupturing.
The Tenacious D incident recalls the case of The Chicks (formerly The Dixie Chicks), who learned all this back in 2003, when lead singer Natalie Maines used a performance in London to criticise president George W Bush, a few days before the invasion of Iraq. “Just so you know, we’re on the good side, y’all,” she told the crowd. “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” The backlash was swift. Blacklisted by numerous country music stations, they saw their chart position tumble and their CDs publicly destroyed.
But Tenacious D are not country music sweethearts, held on the short leash of Southern conservatism. They are a darkly comic rock duo who sing absurdist songs about their cannabis usage and alleged sexual prowess, and who even once wrote a series of animated shorts named Post-Apocalypto, inspired by Trump’s presidential campaign.
Perhaps. more pressingly, this is also not 2003. The tenor of public debate has shifted considerably over the past decade, in no small part because of the ascendance of Donald J Trump. Trump’s rhetoric has long been charged with aggression, whether he’s discussing Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, or pussies everywhere. During his four years in the White House, it was as if belligerence trickled down from the top, and seemed, somehow, to find its way into the drinking water.
It’s also worth remembering here that Trump himself is a performer who reversed into politics, bringing with him many of the accoutrements of his previous career. Ronald Reagan did the same, of course, but his rhetoric was shaped by Hollywood movies, not reality TV; there was a narrative arc to his presidency, in contrast to Trump’s clickbait scattergunning.
The result has been the wearisome dawn of a kind of pantomime politics, in which part of the performance is a ludicrous semblance of outrage. To applaud the injury, assassination or misfortune of anyone is, of course, unpleasant, unnecessary, wrong. But to pretend one is shocked by a comedian making such a comment is ridiculous. And to sustain this hammed-up narrative, to pander to this faux indignation, as Black has now done, is just as disingenuous.
Back in 2003, the Chicks played things differently. Maines made a public apology (one she would later rescind), but she and her bandmates remained firm as regards their rights to express their opinions. They suffered for their stance – the refusal to grovel meant they were largely rejected by the country music crowd.
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Still, three years later they released an album, Taking the Long Way Home, which addressed the controversy, and coupled it with a documentary, Shut Up and Sing, that recounted the fall-out of Maines’ comments. With it, they were embraced by a broader audience, won five Grammys, and established a far deeper legacy, often cited now as an inspiration to younger artists such as Taylor Swift, Kacey Musgraves and Miranda Lambert.
It’s an approach Tenacious D might have considered this week. Instead of them cancelling tours and placing the band on hiatus, there is an argument for playing it a little more elegantly: apologise for encouraging violence, concede the joke went a little too far, then shut up and sing something by The Chicks.