By Wesley Moon –
To make sure he succeeded in pro wrestling, Tom MacDonald tattooed his eyelids.
“I got these dollar signs on my eyelids so that I couldn’t get hired anywhere,” he explains. “I’d have no choice but to be a pro wrestler.”
But when he busted the cartilage in both knees doing a frog splash from the top rope, his wrestling career came to an end.
That’s when he took up his childhood passion for hip hop, and rap is where he scored big. He became the anti-woke rap star.
“It’s definitely not easy being independent,” Tom says. “But with how anti-woke my music is, a record label is never going to let me make the songs that that I’ve been making. The music business and the mainstream media work together at creating narratives and toeing the line. I’m just a free-thinking person.”
He says the unsayable. To Black Lives Matter, he objected that white lives matter less. To LGBTQ, he adds WTF. But his hammer blow was “You Missed,” which he dropped the day after Trump survived an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Tom MacDonald is Canadian. His dad and grandfather loved politics, especially American politics. They were patriots, not just for Canada.
As a youngster, Tom wrote a poem in grade school about the Canadian army. They won a battle but the general was frowning.
“My English teachers tore this thing apart,” Tom recalls. “Why is he frowning, if he won the war?”
Little Tom told his dad. “Of course he was frowning,” Dad said. “He lost all these soldiers.”
Grandfather sent it to a renowned Canadian poet, and it got published in a Canadian magazine.
“I remember my dad coming to my school and dropping the magazine on that teacher’s desk and turning around and walking out,” Tom says.
At that time, he found Tupac and later Eminem. He fell in love with rap and secretly kept a notebook of rap he’d written.
When injury disqualified him from wrestling, he turned back to rap. At first, he imitated the stuff that was out there. “There was a huge disconnect. I was this little white boy from the suburbs. I had nothing in common with these black gangsta rappers.”
Following their example, he threw himself into drinking.
“I became just a raging alcoholic, just partied my life away for many, many, many, many, many years,” he says.
The bill came due. “I ended up having an incredible mental breakdown and sort of unraveling of my psyche,” Tom tells. “One night the room was moving and like shifting around me. I look at myself in the mirror. I don’t even recognize myself.”
After several doctor visits, he was prescribed Ativan, which gave him the first calm in seven months and allowed him to think clearly.
“The first thing I thought was I don’t want to be on these pills for the rest of my life,” he says. “I have a tattoo on my stomach that says if you don’t know where the fire started, you will surely burn.
The Ativan was just another chemical alteration of his mindset, like alcohol, which he traced to the cause of his problems.
As clarity came, he realized he didn’t want to mimic rappers and push the hedonistic and violent lifestyle. “I had the sort of epiphany,” he says. “Instead of destroying, I wanted to empower.”
He decided to rap about what he cared about: patriotism. Moving to Los Angeles, he struggled to hit success with his girlfriend, Nova Rockefeller.
On the porch in Crenshaw district of LA, he heard on the radio a rapper complaining about the fame and success.
“I was so offended,” he reacted. “How dare you trash the dream that I’ve been chasing for years and years and years and almost died to get?”
In 2-and-a-half minutes, the time it took to smoke half a cigarette (at the time, he only wrote while he smoked, and he only had half a smoke), he penned the song that would launch his star: Dear Rappers.
It was an open letter to the big record label guys whining about success.
He borrowed $100 from each of his relatives, took $400 from his rent money, and uploaded the song to Facebook and paid a $1,000 ad. “Twenty-four hours later it had a million views, and we’re off to the races,” he says.
Within two weeks, he got a check for $11,000. It scaled quickly to $1 million.
Anti-woke rapper Tom MacDonald was battling Top 10 charts against Drake and Eminem. He did it all by himself.
“The American Dream is still alive and well,” Tom says. “All you have to do is live up to your potential. That’s why I love this place. I just fell in love with the American Spirit and I fell in love with the people.”
