GWAR
Cain’s Ballroom
April 9, 2026
The full spectrum of humanity's impulses throbbed like a fresh wound last week. Our proclivity towards sacred aspirations took flight in the diverse crew of Artemis II, which captured our fragility and fortune in the vastness of the universe while affirming that we are a cooperative species whose long arc bends towards progress. Down in this toilet earth, a madman brandished the world's second largest nuclear arsenal like a toddler with scissors as he threatened “a whole civilization” with destruction. Those connecting the dots worried that the beautiful crew of Artemis might witness the destruction of our own pale blue dot from their orbit of the moon.
But the Artemis crew came home, humanity is obviously still here, and the only people who would’ve been fine with the nuclear option are apocalyptic accelerationists—or maybe The Scumdogs of the Universe, GWAR.
Well, not the members of GWAR, who are very nice artists from Richmond, Virginia, but their stage personas. There is sacred lore about exactly who, what, and why GWAR are what they are, but they were basically the most heinous aliens in a band of heinous aliens who were banished to “the most insignificant dirtball planet” (Earth) for being too heinous. They lay frozen under the ice in Antarctica until the ‘80s, when an overuse of hairspray ripped a hole in the ozone and melted their tomb, unleashing their menagerie of malevolence upon the planet.
The profane explanation is they are a shock-rock group of humans in giant monster costumes who kill effigies of people on stage and spray mock versions of every bodily fluid imaginable upon their fans.
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve seen GWAR, but my first show was on their Mock The Vote 2004 tour, where they tore apart effigies of George W. Bush and John Kerry and geysered the blood of both onto me and my friends. At a show not long after in the former Brady Village (that big field next to Inner Circle Vodka Bar), frontman Oderus Urungus (the late Dave Brockie) broke murder-loving character and told the crowd there were mass graves of Black people all around Tulsa, and “if you are proud of that, you are a piece of shit.” This was before the 1921 Race Massacre was taught in schools. I quite literally learned of our city’s darkest chapter from a man in a space viking outfit.