What Do You Get When You Put Drake and Hanson Fans Together? A Riot
Did you know Drake and Hanson have a lot of fans? Of course you do. Everyone does—except the organizers of South Street Seaport’s annual summer concert series, apparently. Organizers of the event only expected about 10,000 people to show up to the free concert featuring Drake and Hanson, and were surprised when a crowd of 25,000 fans appeared. They canceled the event, and, surprising nobody, madness ensued.
Organizers deemed the event a safety hazard and called off the show before Drake even played. Ironically, this is when the event actually became a safety hazard, as angry fans who had been waiting for hours reacted the only way they knew how—starting a riot. According to reports, “chairs were thrown, mace was sprayed, bottles were thrown and a table was tossed from a second floor balcony.”
Here’s some more insane footage of the madness:
Drake and the Hanson boys tweeted their disappointment that the show got canceled: “NYPD will not let me go on stage tonight,” Drake told his fans. He continued: “I am so dissapointed [sic]. To all the devoted fans that came out I wish you could have seen what I had planned! Until next time.”
Hanson updated their Twitter with an explanation: “Had to cancel the free NYC show today because of a crazy audience that was braking [sic] things at the mixing board.” Whenever you get 25,000 people together in a small area, expect the worse to happen, especially to your expensive musical equipment.
What we want to know is why on Earth anyone would choose to group these two acts together in a free concert? Not because they seem like they would be fairly odd co-headliners, although both Hanson and Drake did share the lineup at Bamboozle, so there must be at least some fan overlap. But because both acts have extremely rabid fan bases. A free show (or even a show with purchasable tickets, no doubt) by either Drake or Hanson would inspire its own amount of anarchy with all the fans that would come out of the woodwork—basically, neither Drizzy nor the Hanson needed the other one to help fill a crowd. So what were they thinking?
Hanson and Drake, though, shouldn’t feel too bad that their fans were left without a show (and were left with a few bruises and eyefuls of mase). If Justin Bieber’s multiple canceled appearances at the hands of terrifyingly aggressive fans are any indication, you’ve made it!
