Kenny Chesney, now sponsored by the man from Glad
Country star’s concerts seem to bring out the worst in trash-tossing No Shoes Nation
What is it about Kenny Chesney’s music that turns fans into drunken savages?
Consider the apocalyptic scene from his Saturday concert in Pittsburgh, where 37 revellers were rushed to hospital after endangering their own livers. There were multiple arrests for “trespassing, ticket robbery, simple assault and public intoxication,” the quartet of all relaxing summer experiences. The raucous tailgating also ringed Heinz Field with an estimated 44 tonnes of trash, making it look like a war zone in which all crude weapons were supplied by Budweiser and Frito-Lay.
“As the concert let out around 10:30 p.m. and cars began to clear from the parking lots, a reeking, hulking mass of garbage leftover from the day’s earlier festivities began to appear behind the exodus of country music fans,” reported the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Pickup trucks crunched glass bottles underneath tires; fluid from portable toilets overflowed into the street; people covered their noses with their shirts to escape the stench.”
I’m not sure about semicolon use in that description. But if you can’t snag tickets to Chesney’s next concert; it seems you can recreate the magic by getting blotto; and then wading across a sewage system.
“This is not the Kenny crowd,” one disillusioned fan told the paper after presumably begging EMS workers for a tetanus shot. “No Shoes Nation does not do that.”
No Shoes Nation? This fan base should call itself HAZMAT Nation.
This is exactly what it does. If reading about the concert this weekend felt like Groundhog Day, it’s because this shoeless republic of twang devotees was responsible for a similar incident three years ago, one that resulted in 70 arrests and 27 tonnes of trash.
By 2023, Chesney fans will produce more waste than Russia.
What’s this all about? Does repeated exposure to albums such as Me and You or Lucky Old Sun or The Big Revival turn boot-tapping compatriots into tequila-guzzling lunatics? What is it about the pitch and timbre of Chesney’s chart-topping voice that prompts his admirers to whip off their cowboy hats and pound back Jack Daniels and then rush out to make a huge mess?
Until the authorities figure this out, we should ban all Chesney concerts. Or at least demand all venues on the Spread The Love tour be changed to the nearest landfill. If that’s not possible, Chesney should do the right thing and perform inside a gigantic dumpster. His lead sponsor could be Glad or Purell.
Obviously, there is a problem here and it’s one that we’ve overlooked for years as all cultural scolding at the music industry got directed at rap or metal or that godforsaken Barney. Say what you will about Megadeath, but at least fans of that band know how to use recycling bins when head-banging in public. Even in the darkest days of the East Coast-West Coast rap wars, municipal cleanup crews did not toil from midnight to 6 a.m. after a Tupac show as they did this weekend.
Children raised on the grating tunes of that purple dinosaur may well turn into annoying grown-ups, but they are not litterbugs. They respect one another.
Maybe this isn’t even just a Kenny Chesney problem. Maybe the situation is much broader, much more disturbing, touching on the entire country genre. Think about it. I’m willing to bet good money that if you surveyed all Donald Trump fans about their musical loves, “country” would emerge as No. 3, just behind “The Star-Spangled Banner” and a bootlegged soundtrack to 24. Why haven’t sociologists discovered this link between xenophobia and compulsive messiness? Show me someone obsessed with NASCAR or the NRA and I will show you someone who owns at least two George Strait CDs. There are no exceptions.
This is where we should focus the cultural profiling. We should setup toll-free snitch lines to report neighbours suspected of loving Garth Brooks. These are probably the same people doing all the illegal dumping. We should start performing background checks before anyone is allowed to download Tim McGraw or Blake Shelton. We should deploy crop-dusters to douse Nashville with Febreze.
But since we can’t do all of that, I’m blaming Chesney and his fans for giving a black eye to country music this weekend.
Clean up your act, you filthy scoundrels and remember the lyrics: “The sun and the sand and a drink in my hand with no bottom and no shoes, no shirt, and no problems.”