Skillet frontman John Cooper has attempted to clarify his recent remarks comparing Cardi B’s “WAP” performance at the 2021 Grammys to speeches by Adolf Hitler.
Cooper said his initial comments were “misrepresented” during a follow-up episode of his “Cooper Talk” video podcast, denying he compared Cardi B or the Grammys to any dictators.
The Christian rock singer and self-described conservative sparked controversy when he tried to explain that a positive reception of Cardi B’s sexually charged Grammy performance with Megan Thee Stallion was an example of the “woke” public mistaking evil for good. He then used Hitler’s propaganda speeches as a historical example, saying that “every dictator in history says that what they were doing was good,” and that people are “forced to applaud” the “sexual degradation” of Cardi B’s performance.
In a since deleted Instagram post in which she shared Consequence of Sound‘’s previous story, Cardi B reacted with the raise eyebrow emoji: “Not me being compared to HITLER”. Apparently Cooper feels his quotes were misconstrued, backtracking during his latest podcast.
“Yesterday in my podcast, I reacted to Cardi B’s performance at the Grammys,” Cooper said (as transcribed by Blabbermouth). “And it has come to my attention that some of my words were misrepresented and taken out of context from their intent. So, please allow me to say this: I did not compare Cardi B to Hitler, and I did not compare her performance to Hitler or any other dictator, and I certainly didn’t compare the Grammys or the music industry or any other artist, for any reason, to any dictator.”
He continued: “Secondly, I wanna say this: I did not conflate the consequences or the gravity of Cardi B’s performance at the Grammys. I in no way would ever conflate that to the horrors of the genocide that we saw in 1940 or any of the other violence and murders and all the death and destruction of any dictator that we’ve had in history. I honestly don’t understand how it could be taken that way, but just to be clear and clear of any confusion, I was stating that we are living in a time when it comes to morality where we are redefining what is good and what is evil.”
Despite Cooper’s denial, it should be noted that even if he says he didn’t compare the Grammys and Cardi B to Hitler directly, he used them both as parallel examples of the same thing — confusing good with evil — as Hitler sold himself to the public as a “liberator” prior to the Holocaust. In his clarification, Cooper again uses the same parallel comparison while denying it is likens the dictator with the Grammys or the Cardi B performance.
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“Sometimes we have a hard time imagining that someone would do something bad and redefine it and call it good,” Cooper said. “That’s why I was pointing out that there have been many, many examples of dictators or horrific events over the last 100 years where people did really, really bad stuff, but they believed or claimed that they were doing it for good reasons, for moral reasons, for liberating reasons. And as an example of that, I was saying if you were to go back and read some of Hitler’s speeches, you would find that he claims to believe that he was liberating people and doing something virtuous.”
Cooper ended his video by calling the Grammy performance a “microcosm” of the degradation of America’s virtues and morals but not the reason for the “crisis” itself.
Back in January, Cooper made headlines for decrying Twitter’s “censorship” of Donald Trump’s account. Somewhat hypocritically, his tirade against the Grammy performance sounds a lot like a call for censorship.
Watch Cooper’s response clip and original video podcast below.
