Justin Hawkins has added to his brother Dan’s disparaging remarks about Yungblud’s performance during the VMA Awards’ tribute to the late Ozzy Osbourne over the weekend.
The younger Hawkins had shared a clip of Ariana Grande’s astonished reaction to the performance of Yungblud, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry performing a medley of Ozzy songs. He had captioned it: “Another nail in the coffin of rock n roll. Cynical, nauseating and more importantly; shit.”
As you can imagine, the post stirred up some, ahem, ‘heated discussion’ on social media. Now, Justin has largely backed up his brother’s comments in a new video.
“We all watched (the VMAs performance) and we all found it a little bit triggering in different ways,” the Darkness singer said. “I think Dan was so triggered, that he instructed his social media manager to post something along the lines of ‘What a bunch of bellends’, which is poking just a little bit of good-natured fun at the people involved, but it was borne of the triggered state, I think.”
Hawkins criticised Yungblud’s turn on the VMAs red carpet when he threw down his jacket and posed bare-chested in a Christ-like posture. Then he got onto Yungblud’s performance: “I suppose one of the things that irks musicians of a certain age is to watch Ozzy invent heavy metal, then turn into this household name with the television series and his decades of being brilliant, and then you kind of think ‘What the fuck does all those decades of having this incredible legacy got to do with Yungblud?'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHRhpHcxs2I&t=548s
“I feel like what irks musicians of a certain age is the fact that Yungblud seems to have positioned himself as a natural heir to the Ozzy legacy, having nothing to do with the really important stuff.”
He then cut to an old clip of Yungblud performing on the Disney channel, before accusing him of adopting rock cliches. “All of this posturing is Jim Morrison meets the bloke from Stone Temple Pilots meets everybody else who’s ever owned a pair of leather trousers. It’s 101 School of Rock stuff, you know? It’s the latest in a long line of – I’m sorry to say it – poseurs… For seven minutes, the world is looking at rock and this is what we’ve given them.”
“It’s like you’ve watched a movie about rock and metal, it’s like what a male stripper would do,” Hawkins said of Yungblud’s headbanging onstage. “It doesn’t ring authentic… It’s rock n’ roll, but not as we know it. It kind of has this Disney veneer over the top of it, like it’s rock n’ roll seen through an Instagram filter of some sort.”
Of course, it should be said that there’s a certain irony in Justin Hawkins criticising clichéd rock behaviour, posing and inauthenticity: that’s pretty much word for word what many accused The Darkness of back in the day...
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