Awesome! A new single and video from Tooji! A bit more than that tbh. On Sunday he tweeted “Prepare yourself for tomorrow #bigday #changeishere” to his followers. Then on Monday he posted a link to his new single and video ‘Father’, along with the message “My new song ‘Father’ is out, and so am I”. It’s Norwegian popstar Tooji coming out of the closet as gay! Via his new music video.
Cool. What happens in the video to make it a coming out chronicle? WELL! In short – he gets naked and simulates anal sex. With a priest. In a church. In front of the congregation. No big deal!
Crikey! As A-BIT-MUCH as that seems though, there is a wider and more importance message behind it that he’s trying to convey here. In Tooji’s own words – “With this project I wanted to show that love between two people of the same sex has for too long has been tainted by religion”. The project he mentions is Human Rights Above Religion, and he speaks a bit more about it in this YouTube vid. And he’s chosen one quote to answer his critics with over the past couple of days – “God is love. Prejudice and hatred is an act of man”. So whatever you might think of the video and its intentions to shock, one can’t help but commend him for standing up against the very real and genuinely inhumane extremes that so many people are practising throughout the world as a direct result of religion.
What of the song itself though? It understandably gets quite lost while playing alongside the video. So we’d recommend giving that a separate listen without the visuals – because it’s really very good.
