Earlier this week, we posted the distressing news that Lithuanian producer Ten Walls had posted bigoted, homophobic comments on his social media (you can read them all here.) Among the now-deleted comments included a description of the LGBT community as “people of different breed.” He also compared them to child molesters within the Catholic church. He later apologised, but when you start a rant with the line, “I remember producing music for one Lithuanian musician, who tried to wash my brain that I don’t need to be so conservative and intolerant about them.” – you can’t exactly pass it off as a typo.
As a result, Ten Walls’ life has started to come crashing down. First, a couple of big festivals pulling him off the bill. This developed into being dropped from more than ten festivals, and his booking agency have stopped working with him. Eventually, the artist took to social media once more to announce that he’s taking some time away from the music industry. All of his forthcoming gigs were cancelled.
Good riddance to you, Ten Walls. I don’t care how cool or edgy your music was, and it’s pleasing to see that nobody else does either. Ignorance and bigotry is never okay.
Anyway, the Lithuanian president herself has now weighed in on the situation. Dalia Grybauskaitė reportedly spoke to a group of journalists in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius. She stated that the Ten Walls issue can have a positive affect as it is opening up room for discussion about intolerance.
“I believe the incident benefits the state in a way that, in this country, we are becoming more and more open in our discussions about how insular we are, our intolerance of people who are different, as well as homophobia,” adding, “I believe discussions are a healthy thing, we need more of them, as the sooner Lithuania becomes more open and more tolerant, the better it will be for the country.”