‘Asking people who they’re f***ing is my thing’ – MacG

Never one to shy away from commenting on everything, Podcast and Chill founder and host Macgyver “MacG” Mukwevho had a lot to say about the outrage sparked by the fallout from his interview with Grammy-nominated singer Ari Lennox.

He began the latest episode of his weekly recap episode by claiming that he had no idea what had happened after the interview was published.

He then asked his co-host to give him a breakdown of how the situation unfolded.

MacG claimed to not have known Ari prior to the interview which took place late last year and said her record label called to set the interview up. He only did his research about her an hour before their interview.

“I stumbled upon her tiny desk performance… So I saw her performance and I saw this girl and she was singing about sex, she’s liberated and I’m like ‘oh dope! I love sex! Everyone knows that’” he explained with a laugh.

“So I’m like ‘oh sh**, we’ve got something in common’ because I’ve never seen a woman so liberated and talk about sex like she did.”

MacG corroborated Ari’s claims that her management asked him to remove some parts of the interview but not that part specifically.

READ: ‘Distasteful’ or just MacG’s style? Ari Lennox taken aback by ‘inappropriate’ question

According to co-host Sol Phenduka’s observation of the situation, the situation devolved because of the tweets she saw that had her feeling like the entire country felt the way a handful of South African Twitter users felt.

“For me to comment on that thing, I need to know what happened,” said MacG to his co-host, to which Phenduka replied, “She took offence, she felt like you stripped her naked essentially.”

He went on to add that he doesn’t know if that is how she has always felt about the interview or if she only felt that way based on the reaction she got after the clip went viral.

Phenduka then highlighted the fact that MacG had jumped straight into asking the question without first prefacing it with the context of where he got the idea to ask such a question which then resulted in the series of events seen in the clip.

MacG then told his co-host that he did preface it by explaining which song he was referring to and why he zoned in on those lyrics.

The pair then got into a discussion about asking artists about the subject of their work, even if (in the instance of musicians), they aren’t the ones writing the lyrics themselves.

The podcast host then tried to justify his position by reminding his audience that he loves asking that question and phrases it in different ways depending on who he’s speaking to at the time. He said he had been asking different versions of the same question since 2008 when he still had a mainstream radio career.

He then referred to an interview with Rami Chuene where he said he asked who she is “servicing” as a means of trying to find out who she was having sex with at the time of the interview. He said he had done so with other guests such as Jub Jub.

“How did it come to feminism now, how did it [become about] me degrading women?” asked MacG.

“There’s a witchhunt now,” said Sol.

The conversation then devolved into conspiracy theory territory with MacG claiming that there were forces at work funding a campaign aimed at targeting him and trying to bring him down.

He claimed that Primedia has been trying to “get him back” for the last three years and that he even “gave them the blueprint” to his entire business structure because they turned to him for guidance on how to launch a platform they have in the pipeline.

MacG then claimed that the deal came with a caveat that required him to give up publishing videos on YouTube which he declined.

He also claimed another media house offered him money for the podcast on condition that they control the content which he refused to do because he did not want to be censored.

He then compared his platform to Soweto Gold beer, which was bought by Heineken, and Instagram, which was bought by Facebook.

“Do you know what they’re doing now? They buy Twitter influencers to speak badly about us.”

According to MacG, a “Twitter influencer” claimed a radio station was paying him R60,000 a week to speak badly about him on Twitter and told MacG he would decline the deal if MacG was able to pay him more.

He went off on a tangent about how Twitter users are “sheep” who go whichever direction the wind blows and therefore, any negative thing published about him will always gain traction.