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July 23, 2022 - The Michael Knowles Show
29:46
Michael Knowles & Tom MacDonald | Music Video REACTION

Tom MacDonald joins the show to discuss his new music video "Names." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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You all know that I am a hip-hop maven, probably the pop culture voice of our generation, and there's a new song out that I really wanted to listen to, watch for the first time, and review in real time.
The song is by an artist named Tom McDonald.
You might be familiar with him.
I realized now I've reviewed six of his songs.
Fake Woke, In God We Trust, Brainwash, New World Order, Snowflakes, and America.
And Tom has been insanely popular, but the gatekeepers who control the lists and the charts and all that kind of stuff, they try to suppress it, which I'll get to a little bit later.
I mean, he's got a new song out.
It's called Names.
It just came out.
It's got 2.3 million views in just the first few days.
And I thought, you know, I've done so many of these songs and And I assume I am 100% correct in my interpretation of every single moment.
But just in case, just to maybe add a little bit of color here, I figured it was time we brought on Tom himself.
Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Hey, thanks for having me, man.
So, I'm going to need you to gut check me here a little bit.
You know, if I go off the rails a little bit, if I'm misinterpreting something.
I think for the seventh song, you know, that's a great, that's a perfect number.
I want to hear it from the horse's mouth.
So, without further ado, let's play Names.
They gon' try to call you names, label you with things till you're ashamed You're a sexist or a racist, white supremacist or gay They'll attack your reputation, claim that you're the one to blame And try to make you hate yourself for ways that you behave They're just names, embrace them and they'll never cause you pain They're just words that another person thought up in they brain They're just names,
they do not define you, that's insane And they'll just call you something different if you change Call me racist, I don't make no BLM donations So, two things I want to get to there.
I'll get to the second one first.
You tie BLM to corporations.
And I love that because the way that BLM presents itself, that it's the counterculture, it's just the natural voice of the people speaking up against institutionalized power.
But then when you look at it for two seconds, you realize, wait a second, All the most powerful institutions in the country, especially the corporations, they're the ones bankrolling BLM. I think distorting, like the line says, I can stand with black folks without donating to a brand, to a corporation.
And I think that for, you know, I think it started off innocent enough and it had sort of like a sentiment behind it that a lot of people sort of co-signed at the time.
And the further down that road we got, the more pressure there was to go to a protest, donate money, do this, do that, put this on your Instagram.
And if you don't do these things, then you're a racist.
And it's just, look, I don't have to donate to BLM.
And I think that a lot of the people that have donated to BLM now were two years removed from its inception, probably regret the fact that they did with all of the things that have sort of come out about that movement over the past couple of years.
So that one to me is pretty self-explanatory.
I can stand with black folks.
I can stand with people who feel like they're marginalized without fueling a corporate machine.
And frankly, the more you fuel the corporate machine, probably the less you're standing with people who would say are, call themselves marginalized or oppressed or something like that.
I mean, you look, BLM raised, what, $90 million?
How much of that money went to George Floyd's intimates?
How much money of that went to people who were, well, there were a lot of George Floyd family members who came out of the woodwork.
He probably never even met them.
There were a lot of race hustlers and professional politicians and activists who made a lot of money.
Patrice Cullors bought a lot of nice houses in California with that money.
But how much of that money actually went to the marginalized and the oppressed communities?
Not a red scent of it.
Not at all.
And I really like that first line of the song, too.
You say, look, there are all these names that people throw at us.
And you use all the names that they throw at the right-wingers.
Homophobic, racist, this-phobic, this-phobic.
And you say, we're gay.
And I like that too, because gay is a line that, well, it's not even really partisan.
It's just the sort of thing you call someone when you're in third grade.
Like, oh man, you're so gay.
That's so dumb.
That's so stupid.
And so that's one that kind of cuts against the idea that you're just putting out right-wing propaganda.
Well, absolutely.
That was the point.
That was the point.
And I also knew, like, I knew what I was asking for by doing that, too, because there was a lot of people who stood up and said, like, you're homophobic because you said gay in the context of all of these other horrible names that you used.
And to me, it's just like the whole point of using that word where I used it just went so far over so many people's heads.
They're so...
I'm obsessed with having something to be angry about.
That instead of for two seconds, sitting back for a minute and being like, okay, why did he use that word there?
Instead of having the conversation or asking the question, it's just immediate attack, attack, attack.
People calling me homophobic, which is essentially what the song's about, the names that people call you.
Right.
I had a debate once, not that long ago, with a friend of mine who is definitely a little bit light in the loafers.
He's not exactly into the chicks.
We were having this whole discussion about whether or not science is fake and gay.
It occurred to me, someone would probably come in if they overheard that conversation and say, you guys are homophobic.
It would be, of course, up to their ignorance that This guy is, he's the first part of that word.
It's not, you know, not the, there's no phobia going on at all.
Okay, let's keep let's keep going.
I miss the old days Call me loser, call me bigot Call me stupid, call me bitter Call me ugly, call me cracker Call me doucher, call me trigger You can call me what you want Cause at the end of the day Man, they're just names Go ahead and call us names, dawg Let's put a pause there.
The transgender aspect of this, I think, is really interesting, because the whole thesis of the song is, it really doesn't matter what you call me.
I know that those things aren't fair or true, and so whatever.
Call me whatever you want.
I'm rubber, you're glue.
It bounces off of me, and it's no big deal.
But I think it was a little more poetic than that, though, right?
It was a little more poetic, yeah.
It was like when George W. Bush, he said, Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice.
The point is, you're not going to fool me again.
But, you know, the...
The flip side of the names issue is obviously transgenderism, because the transgender debate is all about names.
Whether or not I am forced to call a dude who thinks he's a woman, she and her, and use some fake woman's name instead of his actual name.
The flip side of this is that the transgender argument says...
If you do not call me the names that I demand that you call me, if you do not constantly affirm whatever delusion I've got, you are destroying my existence.
You might as well kill me.
The names you call me are the most important things in my life.
You've just flipped it 180 degrees from reality, from the I am rubber and you are glue.
Right.
So, yeah, that's pretty much that line in the song that was, call me transphobic.
I support you and your policies.
I just can't ignore the very basics of biology.
To me, that whole thing is just that I don't have any problem with trans people or people that want to define their own genders and live in that world and do that whole thing.
It's just, at some point, Along the way here, I have to draw the line somewhere and say, hey, here is where I stopped participating in this charade that you guys...
Inevitably, it comes to an end somewhere.
So for me, if you want to go do that over there and go do your thing, fine.
I'm going to do my thing over here.
I'm not going to interfere with you guys.
Don't interfere with me.
Don't force me to...
When you start saying things like, if you misgender somebody, it's a crime.
It's against the law to misgender somebody.
Or words are actual violence.
When you start saying things like this, That's a slippery slope, man.
You're going to end up in a real gnarly situation when misgendering somebody becomes a crime.
Right.
And ironic, of course, because the only people misgendering anyone are the people who want us to call the men the women and vice versa.
Right.
Then things do get very gnarly.
All right.
Keep going.
Do your thing.
We ain't tripping because we heard it all before.
Give a damn about the names, dog, we feel no pain Your words ain't gonna hurt us anymore Go ahead and call us names, dog, do your thing Y'all are tripping but I hope you find the Lord Give a damn about the names, dog, we feel no shame Call us anything you want, I'm getting bored They gon' try to call you names, label you with things till you're ashamed Repeat it till you really start believing what they say.
They gon' stamp it on your forehead and scream it till you break.
They love to say they woke, they not awake.
They're just names, afraid of anyone who ain't the same.
So they classify your thoughts as controversial, not okay.
Then they cancel you till everything you have all gets erased.
They tryna tell the world you bad.
They're just names.
Let's pause it right there.
So, I love that line, you know, say whatever you want, I just hope you find the Lord.
You know, I'm getting bored of this, but I really love that.
And I wonder, I don't even know if this was a conscious choice, but that little line in there then brought up this image.
For me, when you get to that next verse where you say, look, they're going to call you names and they're going to cancel you and they're going to come after you and they're going to try to destroy your life and they're really, really going to hit you.
Actually, this is going to sound like I'm being hyperbolic here, or making a stretch, but go with me.
It brought up this image to me of the trial of Christ.
It brought up this image to me of the passion of Christ, where he goes, he's brought up on trial, and they say, they accuse you of this.
They say you're a blasphemer.
They say you did this, and you said this, and you do this, and you just...
Jesus just remains silent during all of that.
And when people ask him direct questions, are you the king of the Jews?
He says, you say that I am.
That's what you say.
You tell me.
You're the one who says it.
And I don't know.
I mean, the timing of those two lyrics seems...
If it wasn't intentional, it certainly works.
Well, yeah, I can tell you for sure that...
The timing of the video versus the lyrics wasn't intentional, but to me, overall, throughout the whole video, I think sort of what you're explaining, I was crucified on that billboard.
To me, all of those billboard scenes, those were very biblical and were supposed to be a reference to Jesus.
You're crucified on this billboard.
There's all these names written up on the billboard that people say that you are.
All the arrows are pointing at you.
To me, the whole sentiment of the song is like, okay, if you say I am, then...
Then fine.
Yeah.
Say whatever you say.
You can't...
Right.
No, there's a line in...
I think it's the...
Memoirs of Frederick Douglass, where he describes being insulted and degraded.
All of these terrible lines are thrown at him.
He says, you're actually not degrading me.
You can't degrade me by calling me names and telling me to go different places.
You just don't have the power to do that.
I can degrade myself in how I react to you, but you just throwing all that bile at me You can't take away my dignity.
Absolutely.
And I think that there's definitely something to be said for, you can take all of the ridicule and humiliation and embarrassment and anger and frustration, and you can take all of these things that people throw at you in life, especially in the last few years.
I feel like you can take all that stuff and you can turn it to power.
You can use that stuff as fuel.
I think that when you have the opportunity to put those types of things in a music video, it's almost like holding up a giant mirror.
And all of those people that are calling you those names and throwing that hatred and just spewing that sort of like rhetoric at you, I feel like they have to like look in the mirror when they see it in visual form in a music video.
I think it causes a lot of like sort of self-examination from these people.
And I mean, if one of those people sees that music video and thinks, oh my god, He's right.
I've been being an asshole.
I feel like that's accomplished.
Right, of course.
And the crucifixion imagery is really apt because there is this Christian idea that suffering, it's at least a Catholic idea, and in particular the Catholics have this sense that suffering is sanctifying.
That suffering, or at least it can be sanctifying, that when people are doing all sorts of terrible things to you, and they're inconveniencing you, and they're calling you names, and they're attacking you, that we should kiss it up to God.
That you kind of take that on you.
It binds you in a way to Christ.
And you say, okay, I'm not going to complain about it.
I'm not going to whine and scream, and I'm not going to debase myself.
You call me all those things?
Okay, you said it.
You said it.
What can I say?
I'm not going to degrade myself here.
Let's keep going.
I love that bit.
Pause that here.
So now you're addressing something that I know there's been a lot written about you when it comes to your politics.
Are you right-wing?
Are you left-wing?
You look in some ways a little more left-wing.
You know, you got some tattoos.
You're not wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and an ill-fitting tie or something like that.
But in some ways you also look More right-wing.
You don't look like some shrimpy kind of hipster at a cafe eating avocado toast or something like that.
So even when you look at you, you say, I don't know if you're left or right.
And then the libs have accused you of basically just grifting and saying that you're just going to make a quick buck by sounding right-wing.
But the libs also attack you constantly for your song.
So I don't know.
They're not exactly straight on their story.
So what is it?
You say in the video, I'm not exactly left.
I'm not exactly right.
I'm not a Republican.
I'm not a Democrat.
So what is it?
Yeah, I feel like I'm definitely, I like to consider myself a free thinker.
And I think that more often than not, that causes me to land slightly right of center.
To be completely honest, I think that the people on the right side of the spectrum I think they have sort of the best idea of what's going on in the world right now.
I think they have sort of the best ideas on how to move forward to make things better.
And I think that's probably a big part of the reason why they've been beaten down and humiliated and canceled and silenced and censored and bullied by the left-wing media.
And to me, it's like, I grew up...
I grew up as a loner my whole life.
I hung up on myself.
I was always kind of like a weird kid and I was a skateboarder and got piercings and got tattoos and, you know, I was the underdog as a kid.
And you think that, like, when you're bullied as a kid, oh, well, one day I'm going to grow up and nobody's going to bully me anymore.
And then you grow up And the bullies get bigger and meat and louder and more intense.
And to me, that is the liberal media and the left side of the spectrum right now.
So I tend to stand a little right of center with the people who are getting bullied because I identify with that.
Just unpopular opinions are as valuable, if not more valuable, than whatever the mainstream narrative is at the time.
It kind of gets back to the religious imagery in the music video, which is sometimes people will complain.
They'll write into the show and they'll say, Michael, I just want to speak the truth, but people keep attacking me for speaking the truth.
I say...
Uh-huh.
Yeah.
Do you remember what they did to Socrates?
Remember what they did to our Lord and Savior, who is the truth himself?
Remember what they did to pretty much everyone who's ever spoken the truth ever in all of human history?
If that's not the age-old story of good versus evil, man, like, you know...
When you try to do something good, when you try to do something righteous, when you try to do something pure, that's when the demons and the evil and the badness come out of the woodwork.
It's just the way that it is.
Yep.
Yeah, that's true.
You can count on that.
Alright, let's keep going.
Call me sexist.
Men run the world cause they're aggressive.
But behind every man there's a woman just as successful.
We will never be equal in every way that ain't helpful.
Our differences are why we're great together.
Call me white devil.
I know you think the system favors me.
My privileges residual benefits from the slavery.
Subconscious prejudice embedded in the system made for me.
Don't mean I never struggled to survive, I guess we ain't agree.
Ignorant and jaded, call me dumb, uneducated.
Call me idiot or redneck or delusional or crazy.
Call me anything society has taught you to say.
Cause at the end of the day, they're just names.
Go ahead and call us names, dog.
Do your thing.
We ain't tripping cause we heard it all before.
Give a damn about the names, dog.
We feel no pain.
Your words ain't gonna hurt us anymore.
Go ahead and call us names, dog.
I'll do your thing.
Y'all are tripping, but I hope you find the Lord.
Give a damn about the names, dog.
We feel no shame.
Call us anything you want, I'm getting bored.
Your sticks and your stones might break my bones, but your words don't hurt.
Stupid loser, ugly poser, moron, liar, crazy loner.
I really like that the stupid, loser, poser, all that, because it opens up with racist, sexist, homophobic, all these words that actually are thrown at people in their adult lives.
And you tie it in, later on in the song, with the same taunts that you get when you're in second grade.
And there's no difference.
I mean, you say the bullies don't go away.
They only get bigger.
They give you a swirly when you're in second grade and then they try to kill your job and kick you out of school or your place of employment when you get older.
And it's just as mean-spirited.
It's really more mean-spirited.
I mean, there's nothing worse that you can be called in today's society than racist.
So, okay, you're going to do that.
You're going to come at me.
Fine, just call me a big, dumb, ugly loser like you would do in second grade and at least be honest about it.
Totally.
We started off that bridge section with your sticks and your stones, which is sort of like the I'm rubber, you're glue thing.
It starts off with this very adult, grown-up version of what these bullies are.
And over the course of the three minutes, it sort of degenerates into...
You loser, ugly, stupid, moron.
It sort of degenerates.
To me, that's the whole thing unraveling and falling apart and destroying itself from within until you're left with nothing but second-grade insults that we've all heard before.
That's right.
And that actually do bounce off of me and stick to you when you jerks throw them at me.
Absolutely.
All right, let's keep going.
We ain't tripping because we heard it all before.
I just love that the guy that's calling you those names just is the guy I described in the coffee shop with the avocado toast.
I didn't know that.
I haven't seen the video yet, but that's really excellent.
That's artistry.
Okay, keep going.
Cool.
Yeah, I really enjoyed that.
So, before I let you go, Tom, this is very cool.
It's very trippy to review a song in front of the artist, because if that song had been terrible, it would be very awkward for me.
You know, I'd have to...
Because I can't lie.
I'd have to try to be...
Like, oh, I really like the costumes, you know?
But anyway...
Because, like I said, Michael, I'm a big fan of what you do, so this could have been heartbreaking for me and super awkward for you.
It just ends up being a 10-minute video.
I'm like, uh, well, anyway...
So, before I let you go, though, Tom, I do want to get to the sales numbers, because I know that your songs have been extremely popular I have been stopped in bars.
I'm not kidding.
I've been stopped in bars around the country.
And people will come up to me and say, Michael, so nice to meet you.
And I think, oh great, they're going to talk about how much they love my show.
They're going to say maybe they love my books or something like that.
And they say, Michael...
I'm not joking.
This actually happened to me.
I said, Michael, Tom McDonald has a new song out.
When are you going to review that?
That's my favorite content on your channel.
What am I? Tom McDonald's publicist over here?
I know your stuff is very, very popular.
The people who put the charts together, I notice they sometimes leave your name off of them.
What's that about?
Dude, there's been a plethora of different ways that we've sort of butted heads with the music industry and their reporting systems and giving us the credit we deserve.
So, you know, it's happened in a variety of different ways.
We had a video trending at number 5 or something on YouTube a few months ago.
So if you went to my actual video on YouTube, underneath the video it says trending at number 5.
And then you go over to the trending charts and the charts go 1, 2, 3, 4, 6.
Like, five has been completely omitted from the charts.
And I just released a collaboration album a few months ago with Adam Calhoun where we did like 45,000 units or something.
And That was physical copies.
And the reporting system refused to count our physical sales, which would have essentially locked us in at the number one spot on the albums charts.
And we went back and forth with these people for weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks.
And we were at the point where we were begging them.
What can we do for you guys?
I just don't get it, because it seems to me, look, what do I know about selling musical albums?
But it seems to me it would be much harder to sell physical albums than it would be to sell a digital download.
And so you're selling the physical units, and what, they just don't believe you?
They think you're lying or something?
Yeah, and it got to the point where this is unprecedented and extremely dangerous for me to do, but I offered them a username and a password so that they could sign in to the back end of MyCommerce and buy all of the units sold themselves, and they wouldn't do it.
Wow.
And we figure out why.
But that's just the nature of the entertainment industry, man.
It's an incredibly woke sector of music.
It's an incredibly woke sector of the entertainment business.
And I don't fit the mold.
They want Britney Spears.
They don't want Dennis Rodman.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
I guess that's probably true.
Also, now that you've made that comparison, I can't unsee it.
I had never made that comparison before.
So...
That's really frustrating, but it is to be expected.
The New York Times did a similar thing when my book came out last year, Speechless.
We sold, and it's much easier to track these things in book sales, and we sold 40% over the number one New York Times bestseller that week, and the sales continued in the following weeks.
We sold, I think, an order of magnitude more copies than people lower down on the list.
They wouldn't put it on the list anywhere.
And they're protected from that because, and they've said this in court, their bestseller list is editorial content.
So if they don't like a book, or I assume the same principle holds if someone doesn't like a movie...
Or a movie show or a TV show or a song or an album.
They can just keep it off of the list.
And we were lucky that Publishers Weekly publishes a list that accurately reflects sales, so they put us at the top of that one.
But the cartels that are the gatekeepers to this kind of cultural content They don't want you to be getting the numbers that you are getting, and you're getting them anyway, and it makes it all sweeter.
So, Tom, for the handful of people, maybe, who don't already subscribe to your stuff, where can they find you?
So, on Instagram, I'm Hangover Gang.
On YouTube, it's youtube.com slash Tom McDonald Official.
Facebook.com slash Tom McDonald Official.
Twitter slash I am Tom McDonald.
If you just put my name in on any of these platforms, you'll find me and hundreds of thousands of people talking shit about me.
I'm really easy to find on the internet, so...
That's great.
Absolutely.
So you can head on over there, subscribe.
Next, I'm going to start working on my rapping abilities so that I can someday audition to be in one of these songs.
Because that would be really trippy for me to review the song with me in it.
I have to say I'm not the most fluent rapper yet, but if I keep listening, if we keep doing these reviews, maybe I'll be able to improve a little bit in the future.
So are you planting the seed right now for Tom McDonald featuring Michael Knowles?
Listen, I have very few specific career goals left that I really...
Generally, I just kind of go with the flow, man.
I kind of see where politics...
But this one, this is up there.
It is on the chart.
We'll see.
We'll see where it goes.
Tom, absolutely fabulous.
Fabulous to really meet you for the first time.
Actually talking beyond just a DM here or there.
And really great stuff.
Keep it up.
Keep pissing off all of the right people.
It's a real joy to watch them sputter and pull their hair out and rend their garments and gnash their teeth.
Thanks for coming on, man.
Thanks, man.
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