It’s been a lovely month so far for us free-thinkers, with the wokescreen tumbling down big-time. First the predicted winner of the Best ‘Actress’ Oscar – a biological man – was revealed to have been a bit of a social media ‘scamp’ in the past, with a soft spot for Hitler. And now the popular modern singer ‘Stormzy’ (real name, the rather beautiful Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr) has blotted his copybook – gloriously so.
I don’t think much of his songs (‘Gals say I’m rude, they wanna see me nude/My name stiff chocolate, I got nothing left to prove… Gettin’ freaky in the sheets, we’re takin’ body shots/Then I finish with a facial just to top it off’) but then I doubt whether 65-year-old cripples are his demographic. He is considered just about the coolest of the current crop of top pop stars (quite easy, in the age of Sheeran and Adele, it must be said) and he is extremely successful; the richest British rapper, with a fortune of around £26 million. He’s not mean with it, either; he funds scholarships for black students at Cambridge and has pledged to donate £10 million over ten years to charities which ‘tackle’ racial inequality, though I hope he hires more reliable advisors than the crooks at BLM.
He has heart; after being contacted on X, he sang at the funeral of a fan’s father, and has founded a publishing partnership with Heinemann, saying:
‘I know too many talented writers that don’t always have an outlet or a means to get their work seen and hopefully this can be a reference point for them to say, “I can be an author” and for that to be a realistic and achievable goal. Reading and writing as a kid were integral to where I am today.’
Nobody’s perfect; when talking about Megan Markle, Stormzy can appear as though proffering his credentials for the position of Groom of the Stool, which may well be open soon due to the royal writer Omid Scobie having his assets dissolved. (Painful, but probably inevitable if you have that many chemicals injected into you.)
Still, maybe Stormzy is merely extending Christian charity to Meghan; he often professes his faith, when not boasting about how much sex and money he has, and on Christmas Day 2019 read a passage from the Gospel of Luke on the BBC.
Like many a young Christian black man, Stormzy is not a wet-wipe-woke type, believing instead in the kind of muscular Christianity which does not altogether approve of homosexuality. I think we can safely say he will not be ‘dating’ a ‘trans-woman’ any time soon.
I was reminded of the recent case of the black British footballer Marc Guehi who wrote ‘I love Jesus’ on his mandatory LGBTQ armband and was reprimanded by the FA, although they were completely quiet when the Muslim Sam Morsy refused to wear one at all due to his ‘religious beliefs’. Albeit, Stormzy’s feelings about homosexuality were expressed somewhat less lovingly than Guehi’s. In 2017 he posted a series of messages on X in which he referred to a gay character on the soap opera as a ‘fucking fag’ and as a final flourish inquired of someone who was discussing using hair straighteners if they were a ‘fag’ too.
Still, Stormzy’s support for Magic Grandpa (‘My man, Jeremy! Young Jeremy, my guy. I dig what he says. I saw some sick picture of him from back in the day when he was campaigning about anti-apartheid and I thought: yeah, I like your energy… I feel like he gets what the ethnic minorities are going through and the homeless’) kept him onside with the grubby remains of the British left.
His frequent tweets in support of ‘Palestine’ did the same – until last week, when he deleted a pro-Pally Instagram message and unveiled his latest of many lucrative collaborations, the new McDonald’s limited edition ‘Stormzy Meal’. I wasn’t even aware of it, but apparently McDonald’s is the subject of a boycott by Pally-allies for handing out thousands of free meals to the IDF after the Islamofascist pogroms of October 7 – so I’ll deffo be popping in for one of their famous ‘Filet-O-Fish’ sarnies.
Jeremy Corbyn has lashed himself into a right old tizzy at the tasty union between Stormzy and McDonald’s, with his Peace and Justice Project urging Stormzy to ‘help us take genocide off the menu’.
I’d advise anyone who cares about Magic G to make him have a nice sit down, and just think about how it looks for a 75-year-old geezer to be involved in a social media moral crusade against a pop star young enough to be his grandson over the issue of the ‘Stormzy Meal’. (Nine Chicken McNuggets, crispy fries, Sprite Zero, and your choice of a classic Apple Pie or an Oreo McFlurry, if you’re buying.)
Rather than getting himself whipped up into a heart-sick hate-pash over his fallen idol, Jez should try adopting my vastly more grown-up attitude to pop stars. I presume they became entertainers because they wanted to make masses of money and have beautiful lovers – not so they could influence international conflicts. They’d have done the dreary legwork politicians have to do if they’d wanted that. But I do reckon that all adults could easily aim not to care about the political views of hoofers, crooners, mummers and drolls. Let’s face it, it’s not like Stormzy’s going to think, ‘Oh, that never occurred to me – I’m going to cancel my £4.5 million contract with McDonald’s right now.’
All you angry ex-Stormzy’s fans out there, why not try being more like me in your attitude to entertainers? They should simply think ‘I like that record!’ or ‘I like that film!’ – rather than panting like loll-tongued dogs after some celebrity and then getting all disappointed when they hurt your feelings. ‘Expectations are resentments waiting to happen,’ a wise person once said, and this is rarely truer than when we hitch our wagon to a star, as the doomed union of Stormeo and Jezulette illustrates.
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