Taake’s Entire North American Tour Has Been Canceled
Shortly after learning this afternoon that the San Diego date of Taake’s upcoming North American tour has been canceled, we got word that one more show has gotten the axe with another in jeopardy: The Portland Mercury is reporting that the April 9th show at the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland, OR has been called off, while those with tickets to the March 29th show in Lexington, KY have reported being issued refunds. That would bring the total number of shows canceled or in doubt to ten out of the tour’s 19 total stops.
The above news inspired Metal Insider to look into every remaining show on the tour, and what they found out is this: all but two of the venue websites have either updated the show status to “canceled” or removed the listing entirely. In other words: this tour is done.
The band promised on Saturday via Facebook that they’d be issuing a statement on the matter soon, although they have yet to do so. That was before the latest round of cancelations.
The cancelations stem from a 2007 photo of Taake frontmen Hoest with a swastika painted on his chest during a performance in Germany, with antifa having taken up the cause of pressuring venues to cancel their shows starting with New York City, and it’s been a snowball effect from there. Taake haven’t commented on the matter since February 16th following the NYC cancelation, but they vehemently denied any links to nazi ideologies or racism.
Even for a site run by so-called SJWs like us, this is a tough one: do Taake deserve to be castigated for one incident that happened over a decade ago that they’ve repeatedly explained and apologized for? Maybe not, but in spite of Hoest’s repeated denials of white supremacist ideologies, his lyrics are incredibly hateful and Islamophobic and he still proudly sports the iron cross, a well-known symbol of Nazi Germany (even though other notable metal musicians have worn the iron cross, Hoest is doing himself no favors here) and clearly anti-Muslim clothing.
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