We’ve all heard tales of touring bands, weary and confused after weeks of anonymous hotel rooms and rest stops, accidentally shouting out the wrong city on stage. Why, just a couple months back, Guns N’ Roses were booed when a guitar technician accidentally shouted “hello, Sydney!” in Melbourne, Australia, a mistake guitarist Slash referred to as the band’s “Spinal Tap moment.” But leave it to pop-EDM hitmakers and errant piece of grit in the contact lens of America the Chainsmokers to take pissing off your audience to new heights.
Over the weekend, the duo played a sold-out show in Pittsburgh, PA, home of the Andy Warhol Museum, architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece Fallingwater, and more bars per capita than any other American city. At the end of the show, the band unfurled a banner thanking the good people of Steel City for coughing up money to go see a band they could hear for free any time they like at Forever 21. However, they made one fatal miscalculation:
1 easy way to make Pittsburgh hate the Chainsmokers, forever. pic.twitter.com/WMxFejBc2l
— Ashley (@shDell18) April 23, 2017
To be fair to Chainsmokers members Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall, they’re not personally responsible for the backdrops at their live shows, and someone in their visual department was actually culpable for the error, according to MTV News. But it does bring to mind the old rock ‘n’ roll wives’ tale about adding “no brown M&Ms” to a tour rider as a test of road crews’ attention to detail. Perhaps the “proud frat boys of EDM” should consider adding something similar— “no camo cans, Four Loko Bold only” maybe—to theirs?