It’s atypical backing music for a rap album, but Macklemore is kind of an atypical rapper. Even a goofy song like "Dance Off" gets a swelling horror-movie organ intro before a big dancehall rhythm kicks in. He developed the big-tent struggle gospel sound of The Heist with Ryan Lewis after a decade spent as an underground rapper, and the formula hasn’t changed much here: There are still lots of choirs, dramatic string cues, and dewy pianos set to tug heart strings. On "Growing Up," Macklemore dictates a comprehensive list of cool-dad lessons for his newborn child ("Listen to your teachers, but cheat in calculus" "Take your girl to the prom, but don’t get too drunk hanging out the limo.") His knowledge is slightly undermined when he recommends reading Langston Hughes’ A Raisin in the Sun (Langston Hughes did not write A Raisin in the Sun), but hey, nobody’s perfect. Ides" is a tender travelogue of his days as a teenage alcoholic. "Buckshot," meanwhile, reflects on his days as a rebellious graffiti artist, featuring KRS-One and DJ Premier, and "St.
("I wish I had the homies with me here but nope/ Most of the artists I know don’t get invited to this show.") He waxes about how "they" want gossip, drama, for Kanye's rant "to go on longer." As he accepts an award (which may be the Grammy he robbed Kendrick of), he ponders how he’ll explain "this unruly mess I’ve made"-a slightly disingenuous "aw shucks" characterization of his career that nevertheless communicates some truth about the weight of his expectations. On the opener "Light Tunnels," he narrates a trip to an awards show: He feels desperately out of place in his town car and his tux, the industry’s eyes on him without his friends for support. Macklemore has more appeal as the everyman-a normal guy who who just stumbled into all this pageantry. (In interviews, he’s said he also lapsed back into his addiction within the past few years, giving his words a different urgency.)īut Leon Bridges’ hook is too moralizing, and it has the maudlin feel of a song written to solve a problem.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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