The More You Deplore Me, The Rougher I Get

04/29/09 12:17pm

by Aaron Brophy (CHARTattack)

The dynamics of when rock celebrities come out swingin'

John Lennon wanted us all to give peace a chance, but there've been a number of incidents in recent months where celebrity musicians certainly didn't.

It's pretty well understood that rock star celebrities don't exactly defined society's high moral ground. That said, there's a particular emerging grey area in how these artists deal with excessive heckling from members of the public. Faced with such harassment, the response has increasingly been a punch to the teeth.

Nickelback's Chad Kroeger partied for his right to fight at a Vancouver nightclub this past May. Apparently the singer was being heckled non-stop by some dude hurling inventive taunts like "Nickelback sucks." So Kroeger's alleged retort
was five knuckles to the guy's face outside the club.

Relative merits of Nickelback's music aside, put yourself in Kroeger's shoes for a moment. You're out on the town, trying to have a couple drinks with some friends, maybe checking out a band and then some yob starts harassing you, and then keeps harassing you. Sure you could turn the other cheek and be the better person. And sure you could maybe discreetly request that the bar have the person removed. Or not. Kroeger didn't.

For the record, what sort of sad, shiftless person defines themselves by relentlessly taunting Chad Kroeger? Rattling Kroeger was probably the dizzyingly highest high of the heckler's life, but the depth of such patheticness is unmeasureable.

Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz had his own run-in with a heckler. It was at a Spin-sponsored acoustic show he performed in Chicago in June. He explained his actions in a statement to MTV:

"Yes, the guy was heckling me and the band, so were other people, most in good fun. But we get heckled onstage all the time, and while I'm a jerk, I'm not the kind of person who would ever lash out at someone simply over this... The truth is on the way out the door I had to pass directly next to the guy and I knew it, so I kept my head down and walked out. As I did,the guy reached out and grabbed me and said something I couldn't really hear — it was a glorious use of the English language, though. As he grabbed me, I punched him. Yell all you want at me, say whatever, but in a situation like that I will defend myself. After that, of course, it got chaotic, [but] we have several independent witnesses that gave statements saying he grabbed me first... I am not worried over the outcome, as I was clearly in the right."

Timbaland also dropped the gloves outside a bar in Germany in June. Depending on what side you're on, either Tim was hitting on a woman, or she approached him first. Either way, her boyfriend didn't like it and proceeded to hurl insults at Timbaland that would be considered detrimental to racial harmony. Whether for this fellow's woeful ignorance of the inevitable miscegenation of the races in the world or just because racism ain't cool, Timbaland and two of his bodyguards allegedly stomped a lesson in cultural sensitivity training into the guy.

So Kroeger decks a guy who was bugging him at the bar, Wentz lashes out a guy who made the first move and Timbaland and his buddies jump some European who probably had no cultural understanding of what using the n-word means.They're three wildly different scenarios that all ended in the same result — the music celeb responded violently to affront.

I generally agree that violence isn't the right solution. But I'm also all for people defending themselves. In the rock 'n' roll celebrity world, a relentless heckler is arguably the same thing as a schoolyard bully. So ask yourself this: if you were in their position, what do you do?

The following was my editorial from the September 2007 issue of Chart Magazine. You can purchase the issue at the Chart Shop.

Blog Image: