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Macklemore is a former addict, and his invective about the parasitic sway of drug abuse ("We play Russian Roulette/ And try to find a life where we could be content/ ‘Cause for us, we're just trying to minimize the fear of being alive") carries the moral authority of lived experience. Here, the clattering funk of "Kevin" reaches for a similar understanding about the prescription drug crisis, as the accessibility of opioids like Oxycontin has devastated low-income (and white) communities across the country. "Same Love" wasn’t complicated, but it put a human face on gay marriage that was able to connect with millions of Americans.
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Call him the rap game Matt McGorry-the rare white pop star making political music with explicitly middlebrow outreach.Īnd make no mistake, Macklemore is taking a lot of issues very seriously. There was a lot of effort to convince you he was taking the issue of white privilege very, very seriously. Instead, he gave interviews about the song with non-white publications, and launched a website in which he and his collaborators-including Chicago singer Jamila Woods (who sung the hook on Donnie Trumpet & the Social Experiment’s " Sunday Candy"), community organizer Dustin Washington, activist Nikkita Oliver, and more-detailed its conception. "Start conversations and change the way that we think and we feel." When he released "White Privilege II," a sprawling monologue in which wonders if he’s an interloper and lectures about the literal definition of white supremacy, he didn’t just drop the mic and try to let the song speak for itself. "Music was intended to be that one thing that we could rely on to disrupt the norm," Macklemore said in a video announcing the album. It also prompted criticisms that they weren’t ready to preach from the mount, and after a few years spent internalizing those criticisms, they’ve returned with This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, a blend of juvenile joke raps, inquisitive woke raps, and diaristic contemplations of Macklemore’s life that attempts to prove they belong-that they’re not just white saviors trying to project their face onto the culture.
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This same tension between humility and ego fueled his crossover smash hit " Same Love," which advocated for the very non-controversial idea that "being gay is okay" and made them unlikely spokesmen for easily digestible social justice. But he also needed deeply for the world to know he understood. Success has only intensified Macklemore’s conflicted relationship with rap: On his 2017 solo single, “Good Old Days,” he looks back fondly at his early years as an unknown MC trying to break into the game however, the track’s elegant, ascendant piano chords and heartrending Kesha cameo suggests he’s grown evermore accustomed to playing the crowd-pleasing pop star.Macklemore understood that the only people who thought The Heist was better or more important than good kid were Grammy voters and misguided white teenagers. Their 2012 self-released debut, The Heist, crashed the Billboard Top 5 and scooped up four Grammys thanks to a string of unlikely crossover hits-like the sax-squawked anti-luxury anthem “Thrift Shop” and the pro-LGBTQ ballad “Same Love”-that betrayed his love of pre-millennial hip-hop sounds while interrogating some of the genre’s problematic materialist and homophobic tendencies.
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Upon connecting with producer Ryan Lewis in 2009, Macklemore finally acquired the megaphone that allowed him to project his big ideas to the masses. But during those DIY days, Macklemore developed a reputation for intense introspection and keen cultural observations-on his 2005 track “White Privilege,” he examined not only the gentrification of hip-hop from black street music to commercial commodity but also his own complicity in that process as a white MC. Hip-hop, he said, was “my means of trying to figure out who I am, and to figure out my truth, and look at society and get closer to a connection to something much bigger than myself.” It would take some time for him to make that greater connection: The MC born Benjamin Haggerty in 1983 dropped his first mixtape in 2000 and spent the next decade doing the underground grind. In a 2016 interview with Apple Music, Seattle rapper Macklemore recounted the moment when, at age 17, he realized his life’s true calling.