His endurance makes sense, but it’s also proof of the fickleness of so many components of white liberalism: When you can put a conversation aside when it ceases to thrill you or feed you, how deep was your investment? Is the ability to stop talking about injustice the greatest white privilege of all? He remains the avatar of white guys trying hard not to be the worst, but he’s also - especially in this new incarnation - a salve for those exhausted with the enduring conundrum of white guilt. He’s done, as he put it, with “preaching to the choir”: rapping politics to the white liberals who compose the majority of his fanbase. Macklemore’s new album, Gemini, has been positioned as a “liberation” from the ponderous interrogations that came before.
Namely: Is it possible? Does it always tip toward self-exonerating performance? And what does it suggest about the entire concept of “allyhood” when it can be shelved so readily? Whitman - like Macklemore, and so many of the earnestly liberal white residents of the Pacific Northwest - struggles with the same fundamental existential crises of privileged white allyhood. Vincent de Paul thrift store.īut Macklemore’s popularity at a school jokingly referred to as “White Man College” isn’t accidental. Supposedly, he’d bought the shearling jacket featured so heavily in the video for “Thrift Shop” at Walla Walla’s St. The year before, he had come to Whitman’s home of Walla Walla, Washington, to play a show. But Macklemore was a Pacific Northwest kid, and these were Pacific Northwest liberal arts students. In hindsight, this was surprising: It would be weeks before it and Macklemore went national, and even with the internet, Whitman College remains a bit of a cultural backwater. Turns out, everyone knew the song - it was all over campus, playing at every party. The first time I heard Macklemore was in August 2013, when a student posted the video for “Thrift Shop” to the blog of the media studies class I was teaching.
I am, however, a privileged white person from the Northwest, and have some answers for those of you wondering how this moderately skilled gomer is still around - and what that endurance suggests about white liberal allyhood. Others have grappled, at length, with Macklemore’s privilege and place in the hip-hop world.
After the strained commercial and critical semi-flop of 2016’s The Unruly Mess I’ve Made, Macklemore, it seems, is back. His new single with Kesha, “Good Old Days,” is all over Top 40 radio on YouTube, the music video is closing in on six million views. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in almost 20 years, Macklemore’s new album, Gemini, hit the top of the iTunes charts - a prime indicator of the listening habits of people too old to understand streaming.
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