By Alex Pappademas
In music history, Megadeth front man Dave Mustaine will go down as one of the founding legends of thrash metal; in pop-culture history, he’ll be remembered for writing “Peace Sells … But Who’s Buying?,” whose knotty bass-solo intro served as the bumper music for MTV News throughout the ’80s and ’90s, and for his sad-sack cameo in Some Kind of Monster, in which he accuses his “little Danish friend” Lars Ulrich of ruining his life in 1982 by kicking him out of Metallica for drinking too much.
But on August 7, onstage in Singapore, he added a new wrinkle to his legacy. In a video shot and posted to YouTube by a fan (“Dave Rules! Sorry for this shaky video”) that was picked up a week later by the metal news site Blabbermouth.net, Mustaine pauses between songs to chastise a fan for chucking a Chuck Taylor in his general direction (“This stage is holy, what’s wrong with you?”), talks a little bit about the weather, then accuses the President of the United States of masterminding recent massacres at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, and a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin.
“My President” — here he mimes making himself barf, like all serious speakers-of-truth-to-power do from time to time — “is trying to pass a gun ban, so he’s staging all of these murders, like the Fast and Furious thing down at the border, and Aurora, Colorado, all the people that were killed there. And now, the beautiful people at the Sikh temple. [pause] God … I don’t know where I’m going to live if America keeps going the way it’s going because it looks like it’s turning into Nazi America.”
Mustaine has lately become tight bros with right-wing conspiracy-theorist radio host Alex Jones; in an interview posted on Jones’s website in July, he described himself as “disgusted” with Obama, while Jones described his friend Mustaine as “quite literally the kind of guy who opens doors for old ladies.”
Blabbermouth.net has a partial transcript, although the full version is worth a listen, if only so you can hear how audibly aflutter Jones becomes in Mustaine’s presence. It’s a real lovefest, except for the part that’s a hatefest. Here’s Dave, to Jones, regarding Obama: “Why hasn’t somebody moved to impeach this man? With all of the proof about his birth certificate being fake. And you see the signs in Kenya that say, ‘The birthplace of Barack Obama.’ Hello?! C’mon, guys. How stupid are we right now?”