Rob Zombie on Pandemics: “It’ll Happen Again”
With Covid-19 cases and deaths on the way down, vaccination on the way up and spring in the air, a lot of folks are feeling optimistic about the end of the pandemic. ‘Round these parts such thinking usually leads to “But when will concerts come back?” and while no one quite knows the answer, that’s not stopping us all from speculating.
Consequence Of Sound recently asked Rob Zombie what he thought about the eventual return of live music, and his response was somewhere between realistic and grim, depending on how you look at it, shredding our optimism with a bleak warning for the future. He said:
“I think it will be changed for a while. Obviously, I think it’s going to be a while before people feel like, ‘Yeah, I want to be packed in with a hundred thousand people [at a festival].’ That’s going to be a while before people feel comfortable with that. Then it’ll eventually get back to normal.
“The big ‘but’ here is that if the world keeps doing what it’s doing to cause these pandemics, it’s not going to get back to normal. Because we’ll get over this one, things will get back to normal, and then there’ll be another one. It’ll happen again.
“I mean, what happened is really a surprise to no one. You can go back and see interviews with Bill Gates and different people, even Obama talking about it. Everybody knew a pandemic was coming in some form. So my fear is that everybody has a short memory. So once people are vaccinated and life returns, they’ll just do the same and make it happen again.”
On one hand, he’s right: pandemics will happen again, no doubt, and humanity will once again be blindsided, our memory too short to prepare properly. But I’d venture that won’t happen for another 50 to 100 years… hopefully.
Still, like I said, grim.
Zombie’s new album, The Lunar Injection Kool Aid Eclipse Conspiracy, comes out today, March 12. You can listen to the two singles released so far — “The Triumph of King Freak (a Crypt of Preservation and Superstition)” and “The Eternal Struggles of the Howling Man” — below, along with the full album.
