“It’s all ridiculous,” the singer said afterwards. “I was talking about people who believe they live in tyranny in Canada.”
During a concert at the Port Theater in Nanaimo, British Columbia, on Saturday night (October 15), Vancouver musician Matthew Good, singer and songwriter of the Matthew Good Band, launched into a rant that’s not right well with internet.
Good was playing a solo set and according to reports between the songs, he suggested that people attending “freedom” protests, such as those in Canada outside of hospitals, be put on planes to Congo. In a video shared on social media, he is heard saying “then they can come down and, like 14-year-olds, can shoot them with AK-47s”.
The video is almost a minute long and it appears he started by complaining about the protesters. His comments were initially met with cheers, although some members of the crowd expressed shock when he came to the end of his thought. When he finished speaking, the crowd applauded.
Since the video was posted, reactions and interpretations of Good’s lyrics online have ranged from disappointment to anger. Some people take his comments seriously and call Good a fascist while others suggest it was a tasteless joke. A widely circulated report classifies the group Good was referring to as “unvaccinated”.
Matthew Good responds with a statement on the comments
Good has since spoken to iHeart Radio and says the video took what he was saying out of context. He denies talking about vaccines all together and says he was referring to tyranny in Canada.
A rep for Good provided the following statement late Wednesday night from the musician regarding the comments, video and social media backlash:
First of all, and let me rightly state this, my recent onstage comments were on the topic of tyranny, and at no point did I mention unvaccinated people or vaccines. I don’t even know where it came from, and I would never say that a person has no right to govern their own body.
I was talking about people who believe they live in tyranny in Canada, and yes, I said I would like to put these people on planes to the Congo, and when they got off, 14-year-olds with AK-47s could fire at them, so they know what it’s like to live in true tyranny. I was referring to child soldiers because the reality is that their very existence demonstrates a thoroughly reprehensible state of violence that no one in this country needs to face. In the context of tyranny, we do not live in a nation in which gunmen and boys as young as 9 show up in villages and towns and commit gross acts of violence. We are simply not confronted with this reality. I referenced it to point out that those who believe this nation is tyrannical know nothing of its modern truth, so I used an extreme example to demonstrate this.
Do I really believe someone should be shot? Of course not, that’s ridiculous. This whole thing is ridiculous.
The video posted online stops just as I start talking about how our freedoms are the most important thing we have in Canada, and I wholeheartedly believe that, and that was my freedom to say what I said. You can hear the audience cheering, except for the guy who booed, which suggests to me that people who believe we live in tyranny are still a very small marginal group. Rather, it should be a warning about how easily things can be taken out of context and how you shouldn’t believe everything you read on the internet.
Good also got into trouble last year and was dropped by his record label due to abuse allegations brought against him by former girlfriend, model and music producer Hayley Mather. Good denied the allegations.
This latest incident has led some people to call for the cancellation of his upcoming shows in Canadian cities like Banff. Here are more online reactions to Good’s comments as heard in the music video:
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