This past week has been really unforgiving for Phil Anselmo after his controversial racist outburst during the Dimebash event. The entire community has voiced their discontent towards the frontman in the form of videos, Facebook posts or letters but some are less forgiving than others and are going to the extent of requesting Download Festival to remove Down’s appearance from the festival.
The petition at Change.org reads as follows:
Phil Anselmo has played down an apparent ‘white power’ gesture he made onstage after his appearance at Dimebash last week. Anselmo performed Pantera classic Walk at the event in honour of his late bandmate Dimebag Darrell Abbott at the Lucky Strike Live in Hollywood, California, on January 22. As he left the stage, he made a Nazi-style salute. He shouts “white power” as he makes the gesture, but Anselmo has since claimed he was referring to drinking white wine as part of an “inside joke.” (yeah right!) Commenting on a YouTube video of the incident, Anselmo, posting under the username of his label HouseCore Records, says: “Ok folks, I’ll own this one, but dammit, I was joking, and the inside joke of the night was because we were drinking fucking white wine, hahaha – of all fucking things.” Let’s all show Phil that we’ve had enough of his racist rants & Nazi-style salutes. Lets remove him from the Download Festival 2016 line-up, enough is enough! He’s an embarrassment to the metal community.
The petition has 392 supporters, as of the moment of this report, and is 108 signatures away from reaching its goal, although that still isn’t a guarantee of the festival actually cancelling Down’s performance.
[via theprp.com]
