December 30, 2022
-National Post
Rapper Tom MacDonald, who grew up in Alberta and British Columbia, is known for his anti-woke, anti-government stance — and has amassed a right-wing fanbase for his bold lyrics — is rising to the top of mainstream music charts.
He was called “one of the most talked about new artists in hip-hop, with one of the most divisive personas the genre has ever seen,” in an Inked Magazine article.
In one of his songs, Snowflakes, he muses: “If you lie to the government, they’ll put you in prison, but when they lie to all of us, it’s called being a politician. You think taking guns away will save our kids from the killings, but your pro-choice abortion kills way more children.”
After a video for the song was released on YouTube in June 2021, he gained more recognition, including a Twitter follow from Donald Trump Jr. and an interview in The Daily Wire with Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator. The video has since been viewed more than 21 million times.
That same year, three of his songs made it on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, according to the music publication. In March, his song The Brave, with rapper Adam Calhoun, topped Billboard’s album sales chart.
And MacDonald’s popularity is continuing to rise, despite his controversial perspectives. His latest song Ghost was the number one most downloaded song in Apple iTunes music store on Thursday, according to Pop Vortex — a rarity for an independent artist.
MacDonald’s name has largely steered clear of mainstream media headlines. In an interview with Fox News, he said that “people have become allergic to opinions in North America in these last five years.”
He also discussed his song Fake Woke, in which he says U.S. rapper Eminem used to “gay bash” and sing about murdering his mom, but now “he doesn’t want fans if they voted for Trump.” The song also discusses race, politics and how it’s “more difficult to get a job than purchase a gun.”
“There’s this performative wokeness that’s going on in society today and I think it’s important to point some fingers at the hypocrisy and the way that the world is changing — not for the better,” he said.
He also called out cancel culture for going too far.
“If I’m reading something I don’t like, I close the book,” he said. “I don’t try to call the radio station and call the people who are on TV names or try to cancel them.”
His large and ever-growing fanbase — he has 859,000 followers on Instagram and 261,000 on Twitter respectively, and 3.47 million subscribers on YouTube — supports his message. But he has also been criticized for his rise “to prominence by taking the undercooked platitudes of the Intellectual Dark Web and filtering them into songs,” wrote a reporter for Vice.
In May 2021, MacDonald spent US$100,000 on an instrumental NFT created by American rapper Eminem, called “Stan’s Revenge.” MacDonald used the music as the backdrop to a new song he wrote, Dear Slim, and presented it as a rap “produced by Eminem.”
“The point is that Tom MacDonald bought an Eminem beat on the open market and used it to make a song that really f——- sucks, and there’s nothing that any of us, even Eminem, can do about it,” the Vice article continued.
However, in true MacDonald fashion, he didn’t seem to care if anyone disliked the rap.
“I can’t even pretend to give a f— if you don’t like it,” he said on Twitter.
