When Fans Strike Back
It doesn’t matter if you’re an iconic band or a one-hit wonder… If you piss off music fans, expect them to strike back.
It’s hard to believe that a legendary group in the middle of a long-awaited reunion tour could get bottled off stage, but it happened to the Sex Pistols in 1996. Having reunited after nearly 20 years of inactivity, the Pistols took their tour to the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. During their set, Johnny Rotten actually berated the crowd about their behavior after a number of bottles were thrown onstage. Some viewed Rotten’s actions as hypocritical, seeing as the Sex Pistols made a career on misbehaving, but either way, the Pistols ended up leaving the stage after just 18 minutes.
MGK was riding high in 2021 thanks to his wildly successful pop punk debut, Tickets to My Downfall. Unbeknownst to him, the tickets to MGK’s downfall actually read “Riot Fest,” where the rapper-turned-rocker said from the stage, “Hey, you wanna know what I’m really happy that I’m not doing? Being 50 years old wearing a fucking weird mask on a fucking stage.”
The dig at Slipknot was in response to an interview Corey Taylor gave where he called MGK’s pop punk career “derivative” without mentioning him by name. The back-and-forth feud was ultimately settled by Slipknot’s fans, who booed MGK into oblivion during every festival he performed at in 2021. To be fair, Machine Gun Kelly’s fans also turned up in droves, combating the boos with their own cheers.
Check out our compilation of When Fans Strike Back in the Loud List below.