


It’s like ‘You think this is upsetting? We have a president who says things just as bad, and worse on a daily basis, and we shrug our shoulders.’ From what I can tell, Biff is very much about peace and love in concert, and that dichotomy, harsh and offensive online, eager to commune in person, is the point-drive people away from the chatrooms, and into communal spaces, to connect in person. However distasteful the material on his website is-and, as a Jew, the Randy Newman song certainly made me queasy-I don’t believe it represents his actual feelings, any more than Lenny Bruce (Rose’s hero), joking about Hitler, represents a cavalier attitude about the Holocaust.Īccording to Biff’s tour manager, and several other people I’ve since talked to, Biff is a beatnik at heart, distrustful of technology, attempting to make a statement, however heavy-handedly, about how complacent we’ve allowed Twitter, the 24 hour news cycle, et al to make us. After checking out the material in question, I followed up with his tour manager, a longtime friend of Rose’s, who explained that Biff approached his web presence as a completely separate, satirical performance art project, an incendiary, over-the-top persona, intended to provoke, in hopes that people would engage with him. We weren’t aware of the nature of his internet presence until last night, when a customer e-mailed the club’s booking account about content on Rose’s website.

When contacted for a statement about hosting Rose, Neptunes’ Dan Hirsch offered the following, in full: “Biff Rose was a last-minute booking that came across the club’s radar, a week ago, and was undertaken based on his sixties-era output, which is what he performs in concert. Source for the following, posted October, 2017:
