Paramore’s Hayley Williams discusses Fat Mike’s misogynistic comments
Hayley Williams of Paramore has responded to the past comments made by NOFX’s Fat Mike when Williams was still a teenager. Back in October, Paramore headlined the Las Vegas emo-fest When We Were Young, and during a recent interview with Billboard, she opened up on the strange kind of nostalgia that seems to be prevalent at the moment.
Williams said: “Everyone’s just trying to remember better days, and I’m sitting there like, ‘They weren’t that much better’.” She then turned her attention to the fact that the emo scene was not always the safest place to be if you “were different”.
“If you were a young woman, if you were a person of colour, if you were queer, and that’s really fucked up if you think about it because this was supposed to be the safe place, wasn’t it?” Williams added.
From there, the singer noted the nostalgia for the emo scene and her mixed feelings about being caught up in it before addressing comments made by Fat Mike. “We don’t want to be a nostalgia band,” Williams said. “But I think what I felt was a mixture of vindication and also a lot of anger.”
She added: “I was really surprised that I had so much anger well up in me because I was like, ‘Wait a minute. They’re treating us like a prize now,’ but like, Fat Mike used to tell people that I gave good rim jobs onstage when I was 19 years old.”
Continuing to drive the point home against Fat Mike and his disgusting comments, Williams said: “I do not think that that’s punk. I don’t think that’s the essence of punk. And I feel strongly that without young women, people of colour and also the queer community, I just think we would still be where we were then.”
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