Tom MacDonald, Ben Shapiro, and the emptiness of the grift
I can't stop thinking about "Facts", and if you'll follow me down this path I'd like to make it your problem too.
Facts.
In the past few weeks Canadian firebrand MAGA rapper Tom MacDonald was in the news with his biggest publicity stunt/music video to date, “Facts”, featuring noted non-rapper and Home Depot enthusiast Ben Shapiro sounding like an AI generated spoof of himself. It’s awful, but then again so is everything else MacDonald has put out. At least his other attention seeking videos were amusingly cringe, like “White Boy” (the one where he whines about being called racist even though he never owned a slave or something like that), and “If I Were Black” (the one where he has a fresh take on blackface that absolutely no one asked for).
Admittedly, Tom MacDonald can actually rap, technically. Coming from the school of Eminem-inspired angry white boys, he’s got that lyrical miracle flow. Combining his actual skills on the mic with the right’s tendency towards consumption as praxis has been very lucrative for him.
On the “Facts” music video, Ben and Tom trade verses laden with right wing culture war signifiers while wearing hoodies emblazoned with their liberal-triggering catch phrases, available for purchase on their respective websites. Two different ends of the right wing culture war grift machine united on one truly forgettable facsimile of a song. It’s calculated to stir people up, to mobilize their huge and somewhat overlapping fanbases to buy it and own the aforementioned libs. The subtext becomes blatant when Shapiro urges “All my people download this / Let’s get a Billboard number one”. It immediately hit number one on iTunes, but fell short of the Billboard honour.
This new music video, like all of MacDonald’s videos, is directed by his girlfriend, fellow Edmontonian Nova Rockafeller, in their suburban home. They actually run a considerably DIY operation - even turning rooms of their house into sets for his videos. He isn’t kidding when he claims he’s the biggest independent rapper in the world.
Nova.
Nova Rockafeller used to be a hip hop artist in her own right, toiling in relative obscurity until she met MacDonald. A contemporary of Princess Superstar and Kitty Pryde, she fit that niche of sharp, sarcastic party girl rapper perfectly, but like those other two MC’s she never really broke through.
But she was great. Far from the carefully-curated-to-maximize-brand-awareness scuzziness of Tom MacDonald, Nova Rockafeller had a much more anarchic, endearing scuzziness that was all her own. Choosing to do verses on one of her best singles, “Lunch Special”, in a bad “British” accent for no reason other than for the fun of it all, is something that an image obsessed charlatan like MacDonald would never dream of. She never took herself too seriously, perhaps to the detriment of her career.
To greater detriment however, was her abandoning her solo career to start the short lived BF/GF project with MacDonald, before he figured out he could get famous being part of the problem. And that was it, she wouldn’t release another record under her own name until well after MacDonald blew up, and like his music, it was awful. The woman who once rapped “Party like a child star / Pre-rehab, pre-overdose, pre-makeover, pre-relapse / Everybody looking at what we have / I don’t have shit but a fucked up past” was human, flawed, and unapologetic. Skip forward to the first track from her 2021 return to her solo career, “Hey You” and we get a defensive ego maniac, justifying her career of being Tom MacDonald’s Girlfriend with lines like “I’m back for everything they stole from me / Stop telling me who I’m Supposed to be / They want Broke Nova, they want sad Nova / They want all the smoke until I rap Nova.” These lines seem directly aimed at her old fans, like yours truly. She’s rich now, and she knows we’re judging her for how she got there.
I’m not going to trash an artist for finding a lucrative way to live off their talents, but something about it does bother me. Taking in lyrics like “Hey you, do you like me now? / Are you in love with someone I was? / Hey you, do you see me ‘round / And hate the person I’ve become?” It’s a condemnation that rings hollow - according to her, her old fans want her to be broken, and broke. But it’s just a reactionary pose. She knows she sold her soul so she’s going to yell at the people who noticed.
I can’t help but wonder - is this how Grimes fans feel these days? Both female Canadian artists with cult fanbases who hitched their stars to repulsive men and got rich doing it. That’s probably where the similarities end but the gross feeling must be similar. I don’t have the same connection to Grimes but I did respect her as an artist, even though I happened to catch her at The Mod Club over a decade ago and she was memorably too drunk to perform. I wasn't into her records either and didn’t really pay much attention after that but she did continue to release music to greater and greater acclaim and has built a loyal fanbase. Then she dated the world’s richest chronically online loser, Elon Musk, and had three children with him. You know where her story goes from there, surely we’re all sick of hearing about it.
In a pop music world where we applaud women like Keisha and Poppy who thrive after casting off the chains of controlling and abusive partner-producers, it’s tough to cheer for the ones who choose a much more cynical route. The history of popular music is littered with victims who never got out of those situations, often tragically, but we like to think that the world has moved forward and someone like Grimes can make a name for herself and a career on her own terms. But talent isn’t a guarantee of success, as Nova Rockafeller I’m sure can attest.
Tom.
One apparent near-guarantee of success, however, is pandering to culture warriors. Tom MacDonald’s new friend Ben Shapiro knows the racket well - his company, The Daily Wire, is an online news commentary channel that has branched out into many lucrative schemes, shilling conservative alternatives based on the outrage cycle they feed into with their content. Everything from an online children’s streaming platform to razors and chocolates have been sold with the Daily Wire brand - alternatives to companies which have run afoul of the right wing outrage machine.
Tom MacDonald has the same strategy - he’s selling rap music to people who are outraged by rap music, as evidenced by every comment section under one of his music videos. MacDonald panders to people outside of hip hop culture with lyrics that reward them for having given this whole crazy rap music thing a chance, feeling superior to regular hip hop fans because their rap is actually about something, you know? When MacDonald isn’t putting the woke mob on blast he’s putting hip hop on blast for glorifying drugs, money, and violence. His rap is actually about something.
Hilariously, what MacDonald’s rap is often about is actually just money, drugs and violence, but in the past tense. On “Facts” he states “We won’t turn your sons into thugs or your daughters into hoes”, telegraphing a moral superiority to people who are ignorant of hip hop enough to believe this narrative. He and Nova have made claims about hip hop leading them to drug addiction in the past and how they worked through it, but they hypocritically have no qualms about writing a song like “Chrome”, where they rap about being teen delinquents.
On “Chrome”, released four months ago, Tom MacDonald extols the simple joy of drinking and driving - “I’m a problem, been disturbing the peace / Bourbon bottles and vodka, my Honda swerved through the streets”. On her feature verse, Nova raps “And if you met me you either got robbed or bought weed / The mall rat bum with cigarettes at entrance 3 / Skip so much that when I showed up they’d just call police / Cause I only went to school to settle beef”. Get it? It’s ok because it’s past tense! They used to be bad kids, and now they’re here to tell you, conservative America, that all your fears are warranted.
Of course, I don’t personally care if you rap about doing shrooms in high school. Sounds like perfectly relatable subject matter to me. But it’s so lazy to still rely on the crutch of rapping about smoking weed and kicking someone’s ass while you simultaneously look down your nose at others for doing the same thing.
Fortunately for MacDonald, internal logic and consistency don’t matter when you’re running a grift. The far right, like evangelicals, love a good redemption story. A former villain who saw the error of their ways and will now, for a price, admonish the other degenerates. You can describe all the worst kinds of lascivious, depraved behaviour in front of a congregation if it’s in condemnation of that behaviour.
It’s clear that this is all a big joke. Tom MacDonald and Nova Rockafeller don’t believe in a damn thing other than making money while they can. That they, as two lily-white Canadians, are trashing hip hop and getting rich doing it, is just the cherry on top of this whole craven endeavor. But don’t take it from me, take it from half of legendary conscious hip hop duo Black Star, Talib Kwelli who I watched attempt to debate Piers Morgan about the song “Facts”:
“Ben Shapiro started his career by saying rap isn’t music. You’ve got someone featured on your song who tweeted in 2019: ‘Fact: Rap isn’t music and if you think it is you’re stupid.’ Tom MacDonald owes the hip hop community an apology for putting someone on a song who in 2009… on a white nationalist site Breitbart wrote an article saying rap is crap. These people don’t respect hip hop. Tom MacDonald is making rap for people who don’t like hip hop.”
Piers of course then goes on a rant about John Legend’s woke rewrite of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” because his brain is made of cottage cheese. The research for this article was brutal and I’m never getting this time back. If I didn’t have the internet brain rot before I certainly do now.
Talib Kwelli is right but he doesn’t go far enough - Tom MacDonald owes just about everyone an apology - Hip hop culture, conservatives, tattoo artists, etc. Tom’s gonna be alright though because he’s rich now, and doesn’t care one bit about anything he’s saying. Shamelessness and wealth is a winning combo. There’s no downside other than public shaming, but can you really shame a man with “HOG” tattooed on his face?
Love the perspective