Last weekend GWAR performed at Riot Fest in Chicago, IL. During their set, the legendary band were up to their usual antics, which usually involves making fun of popular people, pretending to kill them, and spraying fake “blood” on the eager crowd!
During the performance, GWAR led out two characters who were made to resemble Elon Musk and President Donald Trump and subsequently beheaded them, allowing for the band’s signature trademark “blood” to squirt all out into the crowd. GWAR has skewered pop culture, politics, and celebrities for 40 years, both liberal and conservatives, equally.
Following the incident, many took to social media to voice their displeasure with the band and festival for allowing it to take place, even being reshared by the TikTok account LibsofTikTok.
Gwar frontman Michael Bishop, aka Blöthar The Berserker, recently did an interview with Billboard.com regarding everything.
During the interview Bishop shared:
The idea that GWAR is normalizing violence is patently absurd.
We’re not millionaires that are afraid of what people are going to say when they see what we do… Yeah, it pissed me off! We’re a group of artists that makes art, and it’s really the idea that what we have done is normalizing violence… there’s nothing normal about the violence that goes on at a GWAR show. It’s a cartoon, it’s Looney Tunes.
It’s a parody of violence. It’s trying to make violence into a spectacle and show humanity’s absolute absurdity. That’s what GWAR is, it’s absurdism. To say it’s normalizing violence is really reaching.
