For $16,000, Ted Nugent Will Stay the F*ck Away From Your Town

Paying an artist to stay the hell away from us is the kind of thing about which we might joke here on MetalSucks. But the good people of Longview, TX have just done it for really real!

According to The Huffington Post, the town had recently hired Nugent to headline their Fourth of July festival for a fee of $32,000. But in January, Nugent called President Barack Obama a “subhuman mongrel,” and the subsequent community uproar resulted in the town paying the guitarist $16,000 not to appear at the event.

Now, there are two ways to look at this: one is that Nugent just made the easiest sixteen grand of his life, and that the town presumably now has a significantly smaller budget with which to hire a replacement. From this perspective, Nugent “won” his exchange with Longview, TX.

The other way of looking at it, of course, is that Nugent is so hated that the town was willing to to do away with half their entertainment budget just to keep The Nuge away. From this perspective… I mean… fuck. Would YOU want people to dislike you so much that they’ll pay you thousands of dollars to fuck off? Sure, the money is good, but holy crap, that’s gotta be at least a little damaging to the dude’s ego, right?