The Black Keys had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad 2024. (And hey: join the club.) They had to find a way to rebuild after parting ways with their management in the wake of canceling an arena tour over poor sales. And rebuilding meant… playing a political rally dubiously titled “America Loves Crypto” ahead of the election. But though the Stand With Crypto group behind the event may have been endorsing candidates, the band’s involvement wasn’t an endorsement of any kind. “It was very simple: We had lost all of our income for the year. We had retainers for people that we were working with. We got offered a lot of money to play a show, and we saw that the Black Pumas had done the same event and we were like, ‘Book it,'” Patrick Carney says in a new Rolling Stone interview. “It’s that simple, bro.”
The band saw backlash that playing the America Loves Crypto show in Ohio generated, “but it was like, ‘What are you going to do?'” Carney says. “We were told it was a bipartisan thing. It was what it is. It was very small. It was in our hometown, so we got to go home and see our folks. I’ve definitely seen my name in bad light in the press before, so it wasn’t anything fucking new.” Carney is overall pretty dismissive of the criticism overall, joking that they’re not crypto enthusiasts but “Crisco enthusiasts,” and observing that “If us playing a concert for 300 people is going to sway the whole state’s vote, then we have bigger fucking problems, bro.”
Excessive use of the word “bro” aside, The Black Keys had their own problems at the time, so that was that. They’re somewhat circumspect about the specific issues that arose with their management (“[Because] I don’t want to get fucking sued,” as Carney says at one point), but they realized the business has changed for the worse since they got in the game. They claim that they weren’t responsible for the whole arena situation, nor for setting high ticket prices for their shows; instead, they got “a little bamboozled” by outside parties. “This whole industry is so intertwined from ticketing to promotion to the management company. But essentially as artists—and this is the thing that we care the most about—it’s almost impossible to talk about this…. You’re dealing with management companies that co-own festivals with this other company,” Carney explains. “You’re at the [whims] of these people who have other interests.” You can read the full interview here.
