Since January 20th, we have seen a divided America. Each week we have a new song or video expressing certain feelings about Donald Trump as our President, and there are even artists that support him. Parodies and emo songs have made for comedic relief. With that said, Rolling Stone recently interviewed Lamb of God frontman Randy Blythe about the upcoming tour with Slayer and Behemoth and pushed the conversation further towards this now broken record political subject. Back when it seemed like a Trump presidency was just a cruel joke, Blythe told us he’d be moving if the businessman won. The magazine pointed not to that, but another interview last October, questioning Blythe’s sarcastic “Go Trump” response asking if it was possible to joke about him anymore.
Blythe responded:
“[Laughs] Oh, everybody wants to talk about Trump. You know, I think we’re living in Planet of the Apes. My brother sent me some footage the other day from these Trump rallies in Lake Oswego, Oregon, and of course there were protestors. And there’s this one anti-Trump protestor who decides to start disrupting the Trump-rally people by just screeching incoherently. And then the Trump people surround her and start making animal noises, and soon all of them are just screaming incoherently at each other [laughs]. This is the state of modern political discourse in a nutshell. We are fucking living in Planet of the Apes.
The whole thing is mind-blowing. Trump has only been in office for, like, a month and a half. There’s so much shit that’s happened in the media. … I’m checking Fox News; I’m checking CNN; I’m checking the BBC to see what other people are saying. I’ll go on these horrible binges of going down the rabbit hole and reading all the different viewpoints of what’s going on. And, really, man, the reality of the situation, there’s no clarity to it yet, because nobody really knows what exactly this administration will do, can do. What will get through Congress, what won’t. Reality itself seems to become subjective at this point. So for me, you know, there’s some horrifying things, but there’s some shit that’s also absolutely fucking hilarious to me.
I have to look at it that way. People got really mad at Slayer when I think [Tom] Araya posted some picture of Slayer with Trump that said: “Make America Great Again.” People went apeshit. They’re, like, burning their Slayer records and stuff, and it’s like, don’t you people think just for a second maybe he was just being an asshole, like trying to get your goat? This is the singer of Slayer, you know? Come on, you know? So, it’s like, the whole situation … there’s really vocal minorities all around that are refusing to talk to each other. I guess that’s just like the last eight years of Congress refusing to talk to each other. The country has become completely bipartisan, and there’s not a lot of discourse. And I think that the intensity of all this can only last so long before people are gonna have to be like, “Look, we’ve got to chill the fuck out and be human beings and talk to each other somehow.”
Later in the interview, theye questioned if the tour would lead towards an “Anti-Trump” vibe.
Blythe stated:
“I don’t know. I mean, I know that we have fans who are Trump supporters and we have fans that despise Trump. So to me, I think maybe the tour … This is such an aggressive package, too. That’s one thing I’m really stoked about. There’s no, like, nerdy prog aspect or weird soft-rock influence or anything. It’s just going to be blisteringly fucking painful. I think that the tour will probably just be a good way for people to get out a bunch of aggression. There’s a level of tension in America that is reaching sort of a boiling point, you know? I don’t know if there’d be any sort of protest aspect to it. I mean, we don’t even know what’s going to happen.
[Laughs] Everything is so bizarre right now. Every day is some sort of new crazy shit is being blasted across the media airways. Someone’s tweeting this and someone’s doing that, and are the Russians involved? It’s an overload. I think hopefully by the time of the summer, what the reality of the situation under this new administration is going to be will be a little bit more apparent because right now it seems – I don’t know – like a really loud game of clumsy chess.”
Maybe Blythe is right and 2017 could be the next generation of the Dawn of Man.
