“They Don’t Like My Thoughts On Things” – Aaron Lewis On Why He’s Blackballed From Country Radio

Tucker Carlson

Not going to be hearing Aaron Lewis on the radio any time soon.

The country singer and frontman for Staind has never been afraid to speak his mind when it comes to his political opinions. A staunch conservative and supporter of President Donald Trump, Lewis has often found himself the target of criticism from the left and the media for expressing his political opinions.

And it’s cost him in his music career too.

Lewis recently sat down for an interview with Tucker Carlson to discuss his experience in the music industry, and Tucker asked whether Lewis was played on the radio:

“No, they won’t play me. They don’t like my thoughts on things.”

And he also recalls that the backlash from the music industry started after he began speaking out against the election of Barack Obama:

“I immediately recognized it as a horrible blow to our country. Immediately. Not even knowing why yet, I just knew that we had made a massive, massive mistake as a country. And so many balls got rolling during that timeframe that we’re still trying to slow down.

When TMZ would get me when I landed in Los Angeles and I was walking through the airport and they’d get me and ask me questions, that was when I started expressing my feelings and my opinions on politics…

I had no issues then, nor do I have any issue now, telling anybody exactly how I feel. And I was already talking about the unconstitutionalness of Obama’s actions and what he was doing and mentioning that what he was doing was borderline treasonous, and that was how I started the ball rolling.”

And he also recalled a specific incident when the media labeled him “racist.”

“I was playing a show down by the border…and this was the rudest crowd I had played to in 15 years. I’m playing completely acoustic, all by myself…I could not get them to shut up all night. Just talking over me like I was the jukebox.”

Well Lewis was trying to end the show the way he normally did at the time: By unplugging his guitar, stepping away from the microphone, and playing it completely acoustic. But with all the talking in the room, it wasn’t going well, and he was trying to get the room to quiet down when somebody in the crowd suggested that he try telling everybody to shut up in Spanish. (Remember, he was close to the southern border).

And it was his response that ended up making headlines:

“I said, ‘I’m sorry ma’am. I don’t speak Spanish. I’m American.’

The world ended, for like a week. Broke the internet, ‘Aaron Lewis a racist, Aaron Lewis this.’”

But it doesn’t sound like Lewis is too upset about not being indebted to radio:

“It’s nice to not have to bow down to the powers that be. It’s nice to not have to undermine my value in a market because the radio station wants to get as much out of my show as they can, so they sell my ticket for a $10 ticket, and they’ve just devalued my value in that market by selling such a cheap ticket when I can sell hard tickets.

I don’t need to sell myself short by doing favors for a radio station.”

Lewis says that artists end up giving up control of their own careers in the pursuit of radio success:

“First you sell your soul to the record label. Then you sell everything else you’ve got to the machine which is the radio which drives music.”