If more proof was needed that Wacken is turning into (or, perhaps, has already become) a complete Kommerz-Fest, one need look no farther than this ban on vuvuzelas. (Yes, it's in German. L2read native language if you're planning on going to this, or any other, festival, which should be the only case in which you should care.)
Vuvus are annoying. Nobody is going to contest this. But the proper metal response is for other metalheads to take the horns off the people blowing them and break them, punching the hornblower in the face if necessary. The risk of getting punched in the face and your plastic trumpet broken should be a sufficient deterrent to keep people from honking on them at night, or during bands, or whatever.
There's a peripheral argument to be made that they'd be unnecessarily annoying to the villagers, but the plain fact is that the year-round population already has to deal with a very large and very loud heavy metal festival all week, and a few plastic horns are not going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back. No, this is just what it appears to be, an unnecessarily intrusive decision that cuts down on DIY expression in favor of a managed corporate experience. This is summer 2010. There's going to be a certain number of idiots with vuvuzelas at bloody well everything for the next several months or so, until it gets old, and a sufficient number of people get punched for it or get their vuvus broken by annoyed people around them. Wacken should not be an exception, and to the extent that this is just being called out for emphasis, vuvus should just be confiscated and junked going into the infield just like, um, pretty much every other single foreign object that somebody might get thwacked with.
The only purpose of this announcement is to hate on people being jerks with plastic doomhorns. And those of us in the Publikum can handle that fine on our own, thanks.
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