Allegaeon Squash Beef with White Lung, Implore Fans to Stop Sending Death Threats

This weekend, the Canadian band White Lung made headlines when their vocalist, Mish Barber-Way, wrote an open letter to Allegaeon, admonishing them for seeking financial aid from fans in order to survive as a band. The letter probably would not have gotten much attention had Barber-Way not used language that was a wee bit, er, aggressive: she called the members of Allegaeon “pussies,” “the laziest, most pathetic, sub-human beta males in America,” “dickless,” and “more pathetic than people who fake disability or rob small stores for money,” amongst other less-than-flattering things. So, needless to say, the letter turned into kind of a big deal.

Now we have two updates to this story.

First of all, on the latest episode of Heavy Blog is Heavy’s podcast, Allegaeon vocalist Riley McShane reveals that the band have squashed their beef with Barber-Way:

“Funny story. At end of that article she was like ‘if this article offends you please feel free to contact me,’ all this kind of stuff, so I did. I actually just got off the phone with her after having an hour and a half long conversation like five minutes before I got on the phone with you guys.

“She was awesome, I’m not gonna lie. It was a very good conversation. She gave me the room to clear the air, all while expressing what her points were and at the end of it, she was like ‘you know, I’m really sorry. I should have talked to you guys first about everything, I was just standing in an airport drinking wine and like writing it on some tiny website, I had no anticipation that it was going to blow up to the extent it did.’

“And she was like ‘if it doesn’t bother you I’d like to write some dear gentlemen thing to kind clear the air.’ It’s very big of her, she was really cool about it. She was like ‘it was comically over the top, the article that I wrote.’

“She was like ‘I was writing it as though I were speaking it to someone I was really irritated with.’ She wasn’t trying to make it a journalism piece… She had apparently worked for Vice for a long time and was like ‘that was not journalism, that was just me ranting on a tiny website and it got blown hugely out of proportion and for that I apologize.”

Well, I dunno about you, but I can certainly relate to making inflammatory comments that were harsher than I may have initially realized and which, ultimately, caused some backlash. So I think we can all let bygones be bygones here. I mean, if Allegaeon aren’t still pissed at Barber-Way, why should any of us who aren’t actually in the band continue to be angry?

Which brings us to the second update to this story: according to Allegaeon guitarist Greg Burgess, the band’s fans have been sending Barber-Way death threats.

I feel like we’ve said this about a billion times already, but just to reiterate: it’s not cool to send anyone death threats, ever, and if there were to be an exception to that rule, it certainly wouldn’t be because someone said something you didn’t appreciate about a band you enjoy. This is exactly the kind of gross neanderthal behavior that makes ALL metalheads look bad. If you can’t think of a more clever retort than “I’ll kill you and your whole family!”, just keep your fucking mouth shut, okay?

[via The PRP]