After a week filled with drama after reigniting his public feud with his ex, Brianna LaPaglia, also known as Brianna Chickenfry, it seemed that Zach Bryan was back to his regularly scheduled program. On top of releasing the highly anticipated single, “Madeline,” with a surprise feature from rising star, Gabriella Rose, the “I Remember Everything” singer played not one but three sold-out shows at MetLife Stadium.
Along with openers, Kings of Leon and The Front Bottoms, Bryan pulled out all the stops over the weekend. Not only did the severely underrated Jack Van Cleaf make an appearance on “Rattlesnake,” a song Van Cleaf re-released with the Oklahoman singer/songwriter, Gabriella Rose, was also brought out to perform “Madeline” for the first time live. Even more notably, Bryan called upon none other than Bruce Springsteen himself for a performance of his classic 1982 track, “Atlantic City” along with Kings of Leon’s Caleb Followill.
All in all, it seemed like a perfect get-back weekend for the 29-year-old singer/songwriter. Some of the goodwill gained, however, might have been lost today when he took to TikTok.
After night two at MetLife, seemingly hundreds of fans gathered outside the stadium in an attempt to meet Bryan and the rest of his band. In particular, TikTok user, Vienna, waited four hours, roughly until 4:00 a.m., but he never showed.
Taking to the social media platform, she posted a video captioned, “Zach Bryan driving away from his fans that waited 4 hours to meet him, he didn’t even roll down the window to say hi.”
The post itself seemed fairly innocuous, only garnering 35.9K views and 1,990 likes as of writing. However, Bryan somehow found it. Taking to Vienna’s comment section, he made three separate, now-deleted comments. Defending himself, he said, “you’re not entitled after someone plays two and a half hours to a picture or a hello” and “I went out and took pictures both night one and three I had a third show the next day and it was late, needed the rest.”
Bryan’s finished by simply saying, “GOMD,” which means “get off my d*ck.”
While it’s definitely not a good look for the “Something in the Orange” singer, it was made even worse when Vienna revealed that she was only 14 years old (though he clearly didn’t know her age at the time). Making a follow-up TikTok, she posted an image with the caption, “When I made a joke video and Zach Bryan [got] all pressed about it and he told me (a 14 year old fan) to “get off his d!ck!”
We posted Bryan’s comments on her TikTok to Instagram, and they were fairly supportive of him. Though there were quite a few pointing out his history of controversies and affinity for deleting comments, many were quick to note how some fans frequently feel entitled to artist’s time.
“I mean… he’s right. Going to a show doesn’t entitle you to meeting the artist or getting stuff signed unless you paid extra for a meet and greet.”
“He’s 100% in the right. People think they are entitled to everything these days. Let the man breathe holy sh*t.”
“He’s right. People have no respect and act like artists aren’t humans. And he probably deleted it when he found out it was a 14 year old kid. I don’t iinspect everyone’s profiles before responding to comments.”
“People need to quit acting as if musicians and celebrities aren’t allowed space and peace.”
“Good, people are too entitled now days.”
Like most situations, there’s a gray area here. Sure, it’s disappointing to wait for hours to meet one of your favorite artists and then not get the chance to, but without a meet-and-greet pass, artists are on a tight schedule and can’t be out all night shaking hands and taking pictures – even if they wanted to. Zach, however, clearly needs to learn to stay off social media. There was a much better way to respond to the young fan that would’ve avoided, yet again, more bad publicity. In this case, which seems frequent with Bryan, it’s a case of “right message, wrong messenger.”