As our “Remember When” column notes, metal doesn’t always make its way into the mainstream. This past weekend it did, and not necessarily in a flattering light. Comedian Kathy Griffin, most recently known for her reality show My Life on the D List and drunkenly hitting on Anderson Cooper on CNN’s New Year’s Eve broadcasts, held up a decapitated Donald Trump head during a photo shoot. Of course it didn’t go over well with anyone. If there’s one thing that Democrats and Republicans alike agree on, it was that holding up a mock decapitated head of a president might be in bad taste. However, at a press conference, Griffin’s attorney tried to make it a male/female thing, saying that it’s only because she was a woman that she is under so much scrutiny:
Many male artists have created far more disturbing imagery. A Marilyn Manson music video shows him beheading a Trump figure. The band Municipal Waste has an image of Trump with a bloody gunshot to his head on a band t-shirt. The band G-W-A-R has violent images like this of president after president for years. They’re all just considered bad boys. Unlike these male artists, Kathy apologized. Unlike these male artists, Kathy has endured the most powerful man in America and his family using their family to target her and her employees, after she apologized.
That’s one way of looking at it. However, the fact that she’s best known for being on CNN lately made it a political thing pretty quickly (and they quickly distanced themselves from it). Granted, Tyler Shields, who she did the shoot with, used the same decapitated Donald head in Marilyn Manson’s “Say10” video clip, so the connection is even closer than her attorney knows. But she doesn’t even know GWAR well enough to pronounce their name correctly (she spells it). There’s pretty much no way around it, though: Kathy Griffin is a lot more mainstream than even Marilyn Manson. He’s been trying to shock people for so long that it’s a “boy who cried wolf” situation, and singling out GWAR after they’ve been “killing” presidents for nearly 30 years now makes no sense whatsoever. At least GWAR demand that Griffin give them props, while also stating that they never apologize.
[via Brooklyn Vegan]
