Tom MacDonald and Adam Calhoun
The Brave
by Will Cummings
Tom MacDonald is an alt-right mouthpiece that makes casually racist boomers say “boy, I don’t like this rap stuff, but Tom MacDonald sure does know what’s up!” That’s kind of his demographic – people to share his music on Facebook with Uncle Jerry and his hunting buddies. Adam Calhoun aims to look like a more hardcore and grimier rapper, but he totes politics that are even more backward and deranged than Tom and a lot of gun talk, worryingly. Or so I’ve heard, for both rappers. I don’t listen to them and all I know is the absolute classic “WHITEBOY” from Tom’s singles discography and it told me all I needed to know. Disgustingly rambunctious and tasteless choruses with lyrics about feeling persecuted for being the most privileged race, gender, sexuality, and perspective in the world. It takes an unholy amount of privilege for your main issue with society being that sometimes people don’t like your tweets.
Anyways, this album blows. It’s like a gentrified version of Freddy vs. Jason. It’s like a right-wing orgy and echo chamber Bad Meets Evil.
I’m only going to talk about some of the tracks because the rest are either “I was broke but I’m a big deal now” or “I have a gun and I will kill you”. Also, the choruses are all bad, so I won’t talk much about them.
“Whiteboyz” re-hashes the aforementioned abomination’s chorus. Who knew we needed a sequel to “WHITEBOY”? We didn’t, but God is dead. We begin the album with “Better watch your back, it’s a white boy summer.” This song was released on February 4th. The rest of the verse is about how Tom’s pack of white boys have a lot of ammunition and kill a lot of people. When he clarifies that they are all white and redneck, I have to wonder who it is they are very passionately murdering. Adam gives us the first shoutout to the most legendary white boy, Eminem, in his first verse on the project. He also says “Playing 50 Cent and I don’t even like coins.” I appreciate him keeping it very apparent that he is not good at rapping, as the suspense was killing me. “Ride around, car full of white boys.” You didn’t even have to clarify, we already knew. Bad song.
“Clout” is boring. They both rap about how fame isn’t what they thought it would be. I’m glad that someone finally spoke out about how being a celebrity is kinda shitty sometimes. Adam says “I don’t care you got your cheese up, unless we talkin’ pizza.” Rap gods.
“Fire Emojis” features Tom imitating Eminem’s lowest moment: the iconic “Just Lose It” yell after shouting the “GOAT” out once again. He also says “Got these rappers looking at me, thinking ‘#Goals’”. We also get some Hillary Clinton conspiracy lines and it becomes apparent that every song will have an identical structure to what we’ve seen so far: Tom does a verse, Tom does chorus, Adam does verse, Tom does chorus, wildcard slot: guest verse or Tom does a bridge, and finally Tom does the chorus. Very little deviation, if any. Here, we have Madchild featured on the track who has the worst voice I have ever heard, and I mean that. It’s a mixture of Lil Wayne at his most nasal and Tones & I, but I don’t know if that holds a candle to hearing it for yourself. I would wager that this is a Tom Macdonald album where Adam either added a melodramatic biographical verse or scribbled down some conspiracy bars in his manifesto.
And in “In God We Trust”, we get those conspiracy bars. Tom hits us with “They separate us from our neighbors and they call it social distancing / It's actually a bigger plan, it's called social conditioning / They took away our privacy, there's always someone listening / They're riggin' the elections, planning riots for the citizens.” I don’t need to explain why this is horrid. We also get disses about how the school system is dumbing the children down, I presume by maybe approaching Critical Race Theory which is terrifying to the famed intellectual, Tom Macdumbass. We also get the empty line “Black, white, yellow, brown, humanity needs you.” Is it okay to refer to Asian folk as yellow? That sounds like he sabotaged his flat-ass sentiment with an antiquated, racist description. Adam drops some dimes, like “I can't stand the left, everything they say's depressin' / Ship 'em to the Middle East, they can learn oppression.” I wonder if he heard Tom crying about his tweets getting deleted in the last verse. We also get a verse from Waylon Jennings’s step-grandson who issues a vague Deus Vult verse, claiming that God backs the battle he and the whiteboyz are fighting. And then he calls the sniveling, pathetic libtards “crusaders”. He fumbled his own allusion.
“Don’t Wanna Hear It” delivers a Travis Scott ass chorus with bad autotune and some wonderfully forgettable lyrics about how the whiteboyz just don’t need any drama.
“New World Order” sends us back into the hell dimension and this one is unspeakable. This is the worst song on the album, the worst song I’ve heard all year, worst everything. “Racism is gay, if you're offendеd, that's retarded / And tolerance is great until you speak and you're a target / If a white man paints his face black, he's a racist piece of garbage / But you put him in a dress and he's courageous and he's gorgeous.” First off, fuck off. Black face is a direct assault on an entire group of people to propagate unwavering hate and bigotry. Cross-dressing and/or transgenderism is embracing identity. These two things are not comparable in the slightest. Fuck Tom Macdonald. We also get “Call a dad a deadbeat for neglecting his boys / But a mom kills a baby and you call it pro-choice.” Tom really thinks society is so eager to persecute the poor men of this world while he is so ready to place all the blame on women.
Adam Calhoun’s verse keeps this irredeemable spirit chugging. “Make a system where eighty-five percent of black people fill the prison / Is it 'cause they black, or they make bad decisions? / I ain't good at math, but it seems like it's division / Or is it white privilege?” My jaw hit the floor. I became rabid. And then he said, “Try to take our freedoms, that's how you get shot up / Got our back against the wall, try to just stop us / More guns, more ammunition, please stock up.” This is terrorist shit. This is Dylann Roof shit. And it isn’t over. They close the song trading bars about how white men get blamed for everything and other incel moans and groans.
“Soldier” is a song about how no matter what happens, our two protagonists will never stop firing their guns from strategic, elevated places, “I'ma climb to the heights and I'll strike at dawn / I'm a soldier loaded, so devoted.” People listen to this and agree. These lyrics don’t come from a vacuum and they won’t stay in a vacuum. Some sick, twisted people take these words to heart. Las Vegas, Charleston, 22/7, so many more examples… It’s horrifying that anyone, let alone these two rappers, would spew shit like this. The outro: “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” I have never heard anything with a platform like this be so discomforting. This album has quickly devolved into dangerous calls to action for the many white supremacists who make up these two artists’ main demographics.
After those two songs, I’m done talking about this album. The rest is predictable trash about how life is so hard, especially as a whiteboy. Adam Calhoun says “My life brighter than a light pole” at one point, that sucked. The rest of this album is self-pity about how hard their life is with sprinkles of “the government is run by satanists!” for further discreditation.
This album is genuinely dangerous. It gives bad people bad ideas. I went in expecting a roller coaster of cringe and frustration, but I have left genuinely shook. These aren’t underground rappers, Tom specifically. He has a big platform with a lot of scary people. He can claim that his allusions to taking the high ground and shooting at the crowd below aren’t literal but fuck that. This is white supremacist, mass shooter, ‘day of the rope’ type propaganda. This is terrifying.
Tom MacDonald is an alt-right mouthpiece that makes casually racist boomers say “boy, I don’t like this rap stuff, but Tom MacDonald sure does know what’s up!” That’s kind of his demographic – people to share his music on Facebook with Uncle Jerry and his hunting buddies. Adam Calhoun aims to look like a more hardcore and grimier rapper, but he totes politics that are even more backward and deranged than Tom and a lot of gun talk, worryingly. Or so I’ve heard, for both rappers. I don’t listen to them and all I know is the absolute classic “WHITEBOY” from Tom’s singles discography and it told me all I needed to know. Disgustingly rambunctious and tasteless choruses with lyrics about feeling persecuted for being the most privileged race, gender, sexuality, and perspective in the world. It takes an unholy amount of privilege for your main issue with society being that sometimes people don’t like your tweets.
Anyways, this album blows. It’s like a gentrified version of Freddy vs. Jason. It’s like a right-wing orgy and echo chamber Bad Meets Evil.
I’m only going to talk about some of the tracks because the rest are either “I was broke but I’m a big deal now” or “I have a gun and I will kill you”. Also, the choruses are all bad, so I won’t talk much about them.
“Whiteboyz” re-hashes the aforementioned abomination’s chorus. Who knew we needed a sequel to “WHITEBOY”? We didn’t, but God is dead. We begin the album with “Better watch your back, it’s a white boy summer.” This song was released on February 4th. The rest of the verse is about how Tom’s pack of white boys have a lot of ammunition and kill a lot of people. When he clarifies that they are all white and redneck, I have to wonder who it is they are very passionately murdering. Adam gives us the first shoutout to the most legendary white boy, Eminem, in his first verse on the project. He also says “Playing 50 Cent and I don’t even like coins.” I appreciate him keeping it very apparent that he is not good at rapping, as the suspense was killing me. “Ride around, car full of white boys.” You didn’t even have to clarify, we already knew. Bad song.
“Clout” is boring. They both rap about how fame isn’t what they thought it would be. I’m glad that someone finally spoke out about how being a celebrity is kinda shitty sometimes. Adam says “I don’t care you got your cheese up, unless we talkin’ pizza.” Rap gods.
“Fire Emojis” features Tom imitating Eminem’s lowest moment: the iconic “Just Lose It” yell after shouting the “GOAT” out once again. He also says “Got these rappers looking at me, thinking ‘#Goals’”. We also get some Hillary Clinton conspiracy lines and it becomes apparent that every song will have an identical structure to what we’ve seen so far: Tom does a verse, Tom does chorus, Adam does verse, Tom does chorus, wildcard slot: guest verse or Tom does a bridge, and finally Tom does the chorus. Very little deviation, if any. Here, we have Madchild featured on the track who has the worst voice I have ever heard, and I mean that. It’s a mixture of Lil Wayne at his most nasal and Tones & I, but I don’t know if that holds a candle to hearing it for yourself. I would wager that this is a Tom Macdonald album where Adam either added a melodramatic biographical verse or scribbled down some conspiracy bars in his manifesto.
And in “In God We Trust”, we get those conspiracy bars. Tom hits us with “They separate us from our neighbors and they call it social distancing / It's actually a bigger plan, it's called social conditioning / They took away our privacy, there's always someone listening / They're riggin' the elections, planning riots for the citizens.” I don’t need to explain why this is horrid. We also get disses about how the school system is dumbing the children down, I presume by maybe approaching Critical Race Theory which is terrifying to the famed intellectual, Tom Macdumbass. We also get the empty line “Black, white, yellow, brown, humanity needs you.” Is it okay to refer to Asian folk as yellow? That sounds like he sabotaged his flat-ass sentiment with an antiquated, racist description. Adam drops some dimes, like “I can't stand the left, everything they say's depressin' / Ship 'em to the Middle East, they can learn oppression.” I wonder if he heard Tom crying about his tweets getting deleted in the last verse. We also get a verse from Waylon Jennings’s step-grandson who issues a vague Deus Vult verse, claiming that God backs the battle he and the whiteboyz are fighting. And then he calls the sniveling, pathetic libtards “crusaders”. He fumbled his own allusion.
“Don’t Wanna Hear It” delivers a Travis Scott ass chorus with bad autotune and some wonderfully forgettable lyrics about how the whiteboyz just don’t need any drama.
“New World Order” sends us back into the hell dimension and this one is unspeakable. This is the worst song on the album, the worst song I’ve heard all year, worst everything. “Racism is gay, if you're offendеd, that's retarded / And tolerance is great until you speak and you're a target / If a white man paints his face black, he's a racist piece of garbage / But you put him in a dress and he's courageous and he's gorgeous.” First off, fuck off. Black face is a direct assault on an entire group of people to propagate unwavering hate and bigotry. Cross-dressing and/or transgenderism is embracing identity. These two things are not comparable in the slightest. Fuck Tom Macdonald. We also get “Call a dad a deadbeat for neglecting his boys / But a mom kills a baby and you call it pro-choice.” Tom really thinks society is so eager to persecute the poor men of this world while he is so ready to place all the blame on women.
Adam Calhoun’s verse keeps this irredeemable spirit chugging. “Make a system where eighty-five percent of black people fill the prison / Is it 'cause they black, or they make bad decisions? / I ain't good at math, but it seems like it's division / Or is it white privilege?” My jaw hit the floor. I became rabid. And then he said, “Try to take our freedoms, that's how you get shot up / Got our back against the wall, try to just stop us / More guns, more ammunition, please stock up.” This is terrorist shit. This is Dylann Roof shit. And it isn’t over. They close the song trading bars about how white men get blamed for everything and other incel moans and groans.
“Soldier” is a song about how no matter what happens, our two protagonists will never stop firing their guns from strategic, elevated places, “I'ma climb to the heights and I'll strike at dawn / I'm a soldier loaded, so devoted.” People listen to this and agree. These lyrics don’t come from a vacuum and they won’t stay in a vacuum. Some sick, twisted people take these words to heart. Las Vegas, Charleston, 22/7, so many more examples… It’s horrifying that anyone, let alone these two rappers, would spew shit like this. The outro: “Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.” I have never heard anything with a platform like this be so discomforting. This album has quickly devolved into dangerous calls to action for the many white supremacists who make up these two artists’ main demographics.
After those two songs, I’m done talking about this album. The rest is predictable trash about how life is so hard, especially as a whiteboy. Adam Calhoun says “My life brighter than a light pole” at one point, that sucked. The rest of this album is self-pity about how hard their life is with sprinkles of “the government is run by satanists!” for further discreditation.
This album is genuinely dangerous. It gives bad people bad ideas. I went in expecting a roller coaster of cringe and frustration, but I have left genuinely shook. These aren’t underground rappers, Tom specifically. He has a big platform with a lot of scary people. He can claim that his allusions to taking the high ground and shooting at the crowd below aren’t literal but fuck that. This is white supremacist, mass shooter, ‘day of the rope’ type propaganda. This is terrifying.