It’s another to continue working in a genre that you seem terrified of, that you can’t help but make fun of as you strain to demonstrate your self-awareness and humility. It’s one thing to take your weaknesses and turn them into boasts, to best your haters by embracing them. Which is both awkward to listen to and awkward to think about, considering Macklemore’s commercial success in comparison to other rappers. In his world, music does not help you transcend your insecurities-it heightens them. “Dance Off” features Idris Elba (yes) making like Vincent Price on “Thriller” as Macklemore, not for the first time in his career, frets about the adequacy of what’s between his legs. “Downtown” takes the hip-hop trope of driving expensive cars and goofily transposes it into the hipster trope of driving a moped. “Brad Pitt’s Cousin” tries to make it seem like he loves being called the actor’s ugly relative, and opens with him bragging about his cat’s Instagram followers. Instead we have something yet more unsettling, the spectacle of someone trying to carry on like a pop star when he’s revealed that he shouldn’t be one. This could be a thrilling and extreme premise for an album perhaps in an alternate dimension, Macklemore’s music sounds like Xiu Xiu, or Nine Inch Nails, or Kendrick Lamar on “u”-which is to say, he looks into his own self-loathing unflinchingly, for horror’s sake. Two years later, “Light Tunnels” mines that psychological toll of that backlash for sympathy, but it also kind of endorses it. When Macklemore publicly apologized to Lamar for winning, he tacitly aligned himself with folks who argued that racism unfairly elevated him over the rest of the field. The real-life context for the song is that the 2014 Grammys ceremony was when Macklemore swept the rap categories over Kendrick Lamar, Drake, Eminem, and Jay Z. The curtain comes down and Macklemore only feels like a wannabe. I know now who I am when the lights go out and it falls down And the curtain closes, nobody notices Wanted to throw up the Roc, wanted to be Hova Wanted to be Wayne with the accent from the ‘Nolia Thought I’d feel better when the award show was over But toward the end of the song, he turns his criticism inward, realizing a contradiction in his desires: He’s “miserable here / But wanna make sure I’m invited next year.” And then: He forgot his belt at the hotel-“this sucks.” He realizes awards shows are more about ratings and marketing than art. As for Macklemore’s rapping, he does a solid job of putting you in the moment with him as he looks up tie-tying tutorials on YouTube, gawks at Taylor Swift from a few rows over, and gives his thank-you speech.īut what is the song’s drama really about? He says he did drugs a couple days earlier and sort of regrets it. By all measures, what he’s doing is corny, and that’s why it works: The goosebumps that the song is designed to provide are more typical of Coldplay-style rock than of most mainstream hip-hop. On a song like this, you can understand why he’s popular.
The opener, “Light Tunnels,” uses the most bombastic tools in Ryan Lewis’s arsenal-galloping drums, orchestral swells, a guest vocalist cackling about stormy weather and such-as Macklemore narrates his night at the Grammys. Perhaps in response to the backlash his rise caused, he’s released an album that suggests he is living through the great millennial nightmare: laying your soul bare, and finding only banality.
But the way that song gleefully sacrifices Macklemore’s dignity without regard for the listener’s is typical. The 32-year-old Seattle rapper had the good sense to relegate “Spoons” to bonus-track status on his new album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, his second collaboration with the producer Ryan Lewis and his first full-length since achieving superstardom in 2012. But is there anything interesting about Macklemore’s embarrassment here? How much is gained in the gross-out, really? Vulnerability in art is usually a good thing, and so is honesty. If you make it to the second verse, you’ll hear Macklemore lay into his girlfriend for having watched some Game of Thrones episodes without him, and then giving up the fight as soon as she starts giving him a handjob, which causes him to come immediately. Obscenity: You know when you see it.īut there’s another factor in understanding why a song like this makes some people want to die when they listen. Most people who’ve taken the time to diss the song online-Stereogum: “Macklemore’s ‘Spoons’ Is the Worst Song Ever Recorded”-have essentially just quoted its lyrics at length to provide evidence for its badness. Could Index Funds Be ‘Worse Than Marxism’? Annie LowreyĮveryone has different standards for schmaltz, and if you find Macklemore’s infantile take on dirty talk to be fun and cute rather than disturbing, blessings to you.
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