“Facts,” the rap collaboration between Canadian recording artist Tom MacDonald and Daily Wire Editor Emeritus Ben Shapiro, topped the charts this week as the best-selling rap song, per Billboard.
The single peaked at number two last week but now sits atop the charts with other current best-sellers, including “Hiss” by Megan Thee Stallion, “Lovin On Me” by Jack Harlow, “Lil Boo Thang” by Paul Russell, and “Paint the Town Red” by Doja Cat, which are all in the top five.
Rap artist Nicki Minaj is holding onto the next three spots with her songs “FTCU,” “Big Foot,” and “Everybody.”
Billboard was one of the few mainstream outlets to comment on the massive success of the single, which features lyrics that take aim at the establishment and legacy media.
“I don’t care if I offend you/I was put here to upset you,” the chorus says in part. “You can cry and you can scream, you can riot in the streets/You defunded the police, now there’s no one to protect you. I hope I offend you.”
Even with some of the more lighthearted moments, such as Shapiro celebrating his rap star status and mentioning his “classical violin lessons,” both he and MacDonald agree that the song has cultural significance.
“In our song, in the pre-chorus, we talked about not promoting guns, not promoting drugs, we talked about not turning people’s sons into thugs and their daughters into h**s,” MacDonald told Shapiro during an appearance on “The Ben Shapiro Show.”
“We sort of spoke out against what the status quo in hip-hop is, and for some reason we’re treated — we’re living in some sort of upside-down, backwards freak show — and it just seems like the most destructive material [is promoted].”
“Hip-hop is full of a lot of destructive material; the promotion of violence, the romanticizing of mental health and prescription drugs recreationally — it seems like those things tend to get the most mainstream attention and then anything that speaks out against that, especially in our case, has been suppressed,” he went on.
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Shapiro followed up by comparing the words of Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Hiss” to “Facts.”
“The most offensive lines [from ‘Facts’] are things like, ‘there are only two genders, boys and girls,’ and ‘where did all the American flags go?’,” Shapiro said. “That’s the ‘offensive’ stuff.”
“If we’re gonna make sure the kids don’t see damaging material, we got to stop Tom MacDonald,” he joked. “They really do not want us to hit number one on the Billboard charts, obviously.”
But now they are doing exactly that.
Amanda Prestigiacomo contributed to this report.