Time Ruins All Things
It’s already been a shitty day for Canadians. We had to witness Team Canada lose the gold-medal final of the World Junior Championship last night, falling 5-4 to the Americans in an agonizing shootout. But leave it to Live Nation to crap on us while we’re already down, covered in crap.
The promoter announced today that the Molson Canadian Amphitheatre — Toronto’s iconic open-air concert venue — will now be known as the Budweiser Stage.
Yup. The Budweiser Stage. Named after a very American beer brand. A very bad American beer brand, at that. Say goodbye to The Rant. Say hello to the frogs.
The change comes as part of a multi-year partnership between Labatt Breweries of Canada, which brews Budweiser here, and Live Nation Entertainment, which owns the venue and leases the land from the Government of Ontario. It’s the first time the venue’s name has changed since opening in 1995.
Sure, we can debate just how Canadian Molson Canadian really is (its parent company is partly owned by Americans). But the point is this: the Budweiser Stage is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad name. On the list of all-time worst name changes, this ranks pretty fucking high up there. It’s worse than Snoop Lion. Worse than P.Diddy, Diddy, and Swag combined. Way worse than Xfinity. Hell, I’ll just come out and say it: it’s even worse than the Rogers Centre.
The Budweiser Stage sounds like the cruddiest stage at Coachella — the one frequented exclusively by pop-collared-soon-to-be-shirtless frat boys pumping fists to bargain basement DJs billed at the very last line of the festival poster.
Like, why has it been downgraded to a stage? What happened to it being an amphitheatre? While discussing the utter blasphemy of this rechristening in a workplace Facebook chat, my colleagues made the following poignant observations:
But, hey, at least we can count on the venue continuing to deliver us golden line-ups like this:
Legendary bands @chicagotheband & @TheDoobieBros are bringing their North American summer tour to our stage! Info: https://t.co/eEdp1bYmsw pic.twitter.com/anBLS5zn5p
— Budweiser Stage (@budweiserstage) January 3, 2017
I guess now’s a good time to end this rant. TL;DR: fucking thing sucks.
