During a conversation with the “Heavy Metal Mayhem” radio show, Tim “Ripper” Owens, a former vocalist for JUDAS PRIEST, brought up how his statements and posts on social media frequently cause disagreement.
“I think the problem is I use a lot of humor [when I do interviews or post things on social media],” he said. “It’s funny, you say something 10 years ago or five years ago, and people still talk about it.
“Nobody knows me. They don’t really know me politically. They don’t know me personally. They don’t know what I do [or] who I am. They just know the Tim ‘Ripper’ Owens who does these interviews. “What gets me in trouble is I kind of like to use a lot of humor, so I’m always saying something funny, and the next thing you know it’s taken out of context.
“It is what it is. And that’s what you have to deal with,” Owens continued. “You post something — even if it’s a positive thing… Listen, I’ve lost a lot of weight [and I posted something about it on social media]. It’s a positive thing, and I’m really healthy and taking care of myself. And then people even knock that. You read headlines… And it was a nice, positive thing. Blabbermouth took it off my Instagram and posted it and said I lost 50 pounds and blah, blah, blah.
“And it was nice; it wasn’t like they took it and made something bad out of it. I don’t ever read comments — ever — but this one I thought I would, to see how people can actually make this a bad thing. And, of course, they did. And that’s just what they do. And you deal with that.”
Tim added that he is exceptionally meticulous when it comes to uttering anything in public currently. “I’ve watched what I’ve said now for probably the past three or four years. I still get in trouble; I still say something [that gets people riled up].
“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a guy that talks [publicly] about politics. I used to like posts or say a few things in the past, but I don’t talk [publicly] about politics, just because it doesn’t matter if you’re left or right or middle, whatever you say, the left, the right or the middle is gonna attack you. So it’s kind of a silly thing. But whatever you say, that’s just the way it is nowadays.
“People, they like to hate; they’re never positive. But with that being said, that’s five to 10 percent of the people. I mean, it depends on the headline on social media, because that might be more, but a lot of times, what happens is you happen to gravitate toward the negative stuff that people say about you more than the positive stuff, and I think that’s the bad thing.
“When people say to me, ‘I don’t like you. You suck. You can’t sing. You have a bad stage presence,’ this and that. But that’s not true. That’s not true. If you just said, ‘I don’t like it. I don’t like his singing,’ okay, I can live with that. That’s fine — I can live with that. You don’t like me. That’s fine. There’s a lot of singers I don’t like either. But I wouldn’t say that, though. The difference is I don’t go on somebody’s page and go, ‘Jesus, look at you.’ Or, ‘Man, that’s a terrible record.’ I don’t do that. I’m not that stupid. But when people say I can’t sing, they need to open their f**king ears, because I can sing just about anything.”
