Will Queens of the Stone Age take shots at Imagine Dragons in their hometown?
Hard rockers Queens of the Stone Age are hitting Vegas on Thursday, and they’ve prefaced their visit by taking a shot at one of the city’s most popular bands.
As Rolling Stone and other outlets have reported, during a gig in Houston on Sunday, Queens frontman Josh Homme fired f-bombs at both the Imagine Dragons and the Grammys after the former beat out QOTSA for “Best Rock Performance” at this year’s award show.
Before playing “I Appear Missing,” Homme introduced the song by saying that it was an Imagine Dragons tune, earning jeers from the crowd, and then cursed at the band.
All of this begs the obvious question, what will Homme say when he comes to the Imagine Dragons’ hometown on Thursday when QOTSA plays The Joint at the Hard Rock?
And how will the crowd react if Homme does direct his ire at the band again?
After all, the Imagine Dragons have a peculiar relationship with Vegas.
Though they cut their teeth in the downtown indie rock scene, they were never really embraced in those circles, perhaps because their music was always more evocative of a major label arena rock band — and that’s not a bad thing, by the way, but it won’t win you many friends in that community
The Imagine Dragons have always been very vocal about embracing Vegas as their hometown and they clearly have a fan base here — they earned the biggest crowd of the weekend at the inaugural Life is Beautiful festival this past October — but it has never felt like Vegas has really taken ownership of the band and exhibited the kind of hometown pride that the city has for The Killers.
And so it will be interesting to see how the room responds if Homme takes a jab at the Dragons, especially since there will undoubtedly be a fair amount of out-of-towners at the show with no ties to the city.
Who knows, maybe he’ll just play nice.
But that’s kind of hard to imagine.
Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow on Twitter @JasonBracelin.
