As Ted Nugent looks over the mess that’s his summer tour he still can’t grasp exactly why it went down this way.
Nugent has had six canceled shows (we reported it here) , one in Texas on July 4th, one in California, one in Washington and three at casinos run by Native American tribes this August. All the losses, attributed to unacceptable hate speech.
Nugent screwed up an effort to promote his first new album in seven years with the same behavior. He and his label spent good money to make two professionally shot on-stage videos for two songs from that record, “Everything Matters” and “Shut Up & Jam,” the title track, only to release them the week the news was all about him being booted from three casino shows. Again, because he couldn’t stop the animus and spittle-flecked slurs going nationwide. And the overwhelming press on Nugent, with the exception of a handful of record reviews by people who should know better, features his name linked to being notable for bigotry.
Ted Nugent is a great example of American exceptionalism. He’s exceptional in that he’s our most famous rock and roll racist, regularly on right wing talk radio, in the news and on television, always generating what the Southern Poverty Law Center, now tracking him, calls hate speech. Which is what it is.
Nugent is exceptional in that he’s also the first famous rock and roll musician to earn a visit from the US Secret Service for remarks made at a big gun show about him being dead or in jail in a year if the president were re-elected. Do you know any pop musicians with such credentials? It’s rhetorical.
But the tipping point, now reprinted tens of thousands of times, had Nugent called the president a “subhuman mongrel.” And a “chimpanzee.” The bill for that has now come due.
Nugent has two businesses, one in music and one in being a pundit and opinion-maker for the extreme political right wing, the Tea Party, the old angry white party (aka the GOP), the people who do not accept the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s presidency. The latter, a group that for six years with two to go, has erupted in a racist fury over the man in the White House who they believe hates them (Nugent spouts this regularly on tour), is a tyrant and is destroying the fantasy America of their golden youth and early middle years.
And it is not surprising that his omnipresence in the media has resulted in a backlash at Nugent’s music business from many on the other side. You know, the people who voted for the first African-American president.
When an editor from the Southern Poverty Law Center called the Coeur d’Alene tribe to ask why it had booked someone with a history of racist statements, causing it to dump his show in Idaho, Nugent railed the SPLC were lying scammers, trying to stop him from “doing God’s work spotlighting the current infestation of cockroaches among us.”
The old American paranoid style courses through Nugent on a daily basis. He believes groups of subhuman punk unpatriotic Americans who are inspired by old or dead radicals virtually nobody has heard of except fans of Glenn Beck are destroying the country and, as a part of that plot, trying to get him, too.
When a small group ineffectively protested his summer show in Oshkosh, Nugent immediately called them “unclean vermin.” While he may have thought it was clever, nobody uses that language to describe others, unkindly or descriptively. Nugent has no idea how badly it comes off outside his circle. And on the heels of it another tribe, the Puyallup, canceled his next two shows in their casino in Tacoma.
Nugent was left to speak only at a Tea Party rally in Emblem, Wyoming, population 10, last Saturday. “When he left the picnic to catch a plane, he said his wife had some chores for him to do,” a local newspaper reported dryly.
“[My] lifestyle as a white guy — though I’m hard to accept that designation — is more in the Indian tradition than many of the Indians themselves,” Nugent told Glenn Beck this week. As offensive he-can’t-help-himself neurosis, it’s virtually without parallel. On another show, about protesters at a concert in New Jersey: “[They] actually wear their American Communist Party regalia, they’re not smart enough to take off their identification that they’re not really protesters, they’ve been paid and bussed in.”
Media Matters polled a number of concert promoters nationwide. The consensus was Nugent had made his shows a potential liability. One suggested future touring might only be in the deep south and other remote areas where mostly only people just like him might be found.
But you wanted to know: What’s his new record, “Shut Up & Jam,” like? Find the songs on YouTube. The title song is about putting aside the differences and politics to just rock and roll together. Thank you, no. The video came out the week he was doing the opposite.
One pities whoever did publicity for it.
