Joan Jett Drops a Cherry Bomb of Truth Over Ted Nugent Best Guitarist Diss: ‘He Has to Live With Being Ted Nugent’
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Consider the source. That was Joan Jett‘s pointed retort in a new interview in which she was asked to respond to right wing rock ranter Ted Nugent‘s unsolicited shot at her in January, when he claimed she didn’t belong on a list of the best rock guitarists.
“You have to have s–t for brains and you have to be a soulless, soulless prick to [include] Joan Jett,” Nugent said in a video he posted in December in which he belatedly reacted to a list originally published by Rolling Stone‘s David Fricke in Dec. 2010. Nugent was not included on Fricke’s list, while Jett came in at No. 87. He doubled-down on his misogyny at the time with an added dose of homophobia. “[I] love Joan. Some of my greatest memories include lesbians. I love the lesbians; it’s a cocktail of wonderment,” he said.
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Nugent then topped his hateful rant off with some racism and transphobia. “By the way, if Grandmaster Flash is in the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and Joan Jett is on the list of top 100 guitar players, then I’m Caitlyn Jenner’s boy toy,” he said.
Related video: Joan Jett on her new acoustic album, The Runaways and more
In an interview with the NME about her new first-ever acoustic album, Changeup, Jett shrugged off Nugent’s potshot, dryly noting “Neither should he… Is that his implication? That he should be on the list instead of me? Well, that’s just typical – it’s what I’ve dealt with my whole life, being written off. Ted Nugent has to live with being Ted Nugent. He has to be in that body, so that’s punishment enough.”
Jett, who has never been one to pull punches, then dug up the infamous story about Nugent allegedly dodging the Vietnam War draft by loading up on junk food so he would have a load in his pants in an attempt to fail the physical.
“He’s not a tough guy. He plays tough guy, but this is the guy who s–t his pants – literally – so he didn’t have to go in the Army,” Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Jett said of the infamous story Nugent told High Times magazine in 1977 about his attempt to get a “4-F” designation” to avoid serving his country; Nugent denied the story in a 2018 interview with Spotify’s Joe Rogan, in which he claimed he made the whole story up to mess with the magazine. The myth-debunking site Snopes dug around and reportedly found out that Ted was, indeed given an “unfit for service”4-F designation for unspecified reasons after obtaining two student deferments.
“So this is the tough guy who’s running around America, stirring things up against each other,” Jett added about Nugent.
