Conservative media pimple Ben Shapiro added another notch to his belt last Friday: guest rapper. It sucked like a vacuum cleaner powered by a black hole.
“Facts” comes courtesy of Tom MacDonald, the alt-right’s rhymester in residence, and he makes his money off rapping about how trans people don’t exist and we need more cops. Not since The Rappin’ Duke have the foundational concepts of hip hop been so thoroughly misused. Tom MacDonald takes more piss out of the rap game than Def Jams Recording’s plumbing.
In a blisteringly boring music video by Nova Rockafeller, Shapiro appears alongside MacDonald inside an empty but conspicuously clean warehouse, which is at least a brilliant metaphor for how sterile and abandoned everything these two “artists” do is. They’re wearing semi-matching gray hoodies like they joined a gang whose colors were chosen by a day drunk #BoyMom.
MacDonald’s raps “I don’t care if I offend you.” It’s a lie. MacDonald is obsessed with whether he offends you because that’s his entire schtick, You can tell because he drops one verse of fascist buzzwords, a chorus, and then almost half of the song is a vaguely empty bridge of crooned repeating lyrics. MacDonald has exhausted everything he has to offer in 1:08 of a 3:23 track. It reads like a book report pulled from the back cover synopsis.
Then there’s Ben, the Notorious D.R.Y. Points to MacDonald, the man has the swagger down. He can move and gesture and sell his song. In contrast, Shapiro stands stock still with his hands in pockets up to the forearms and his hood up. The latter is probably supposed to make him look like Eminem in 8 Mile but it ends up resembling a ten-year-old whose mom made him put a sweater over his Halloween costume.
He doesn’t even sway to the beat, instead standing stock still as if his feet have been nailed to the floor. He looks like he was a guest character on the first season of South Park when they were still animating with cut out paper.
I doubt anyone would have thought Shapiro could rap, but this could have been fun. Like how Vincent Price is not exactly rapping in “Thriller” but is still dropping one of the greatest performances in music history. Imagine that, but drained of all joy, emotion, sense of whimsy, or skill. Ben raps like he’s being made to do it at gunpoint.
True to form, he starts with a fat joke about Lizzo, clearly fishing for an “oh no you didn’t” moment that is never going to come. Then he namedrops “WAP” because that song existing is still his personal 9/11. I’d ask why he keeps bringing up the moment that led to an entire planet finding out he had never made his wife wet, but this is a man who burned Barbie dolls on TV, so maybe impulse control is not his jam or jelly.
He spends like three lines talking about how he is a sound investor. Reminder: Shapiro is a rich kid from the suburbs whose entire career has been shepherded by a handful of oil billionaires. It’s easy to succeed when you have infinite resources, even if you’re very bad at the thing you want to do. Like rapping.
But the most cringe moment in a piece made entirely out of cringe and cringe byproducts is Ben’s mic drop. It goes, “I just did this for fun. All my people, download this. Let’s get a Billboard No. 1.” Begging. That’s begging. He sounds like Joffrey Baratheon screaming that he is the king, but no Tywin has ever sent his ass to bed, and now it’s all of our problem.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2024.
