OPINION:
On Monday Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, a white hip-hop duo from Seattle, won the Grammy awards for Best New Artist, Best Rap Song, Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Album.
The second and third were for their hit single Thrift Shop, a playful critique of conspicuous consumption in hip-hop; the last was for their platinum debut LP, The Heist.
Macklemore and Lewis then performed Same Love, an anthem for marriage equality that contains a not-so-playful critique of homophobia in hip-hop. Madonna and Queen Latifah were there.
Thirty-four couples got married. After the awards Macklemore sent a tortured apology text to Kendrick Lamar, who to Macklemore’s mind should have won Best Rap Album, then posted a photo of said text to Instagram.
I found that last bit to be the most moving, because it was the first time I ever wondered if maybe Macklemore might hate Macklemore and Ryan Lewis as much as I do.
But of course that would be difficult. I don’t hate them as people, obviously: I’ve never met them, and their politics seem generally aligned with mine, even if their articulation of those politics makes me want to stare at my feet and shuffle into another room.
And I certainly don’t hate them because they’re white. After all, some of my best friends are white! Some of my favourite rappers are white! I’m white! I don’t even hate them for winning Best Rap Album over Kendrick, Kanye West and Drake, all three of whom made records light years better than The Heist (good lord, that title).
The Grammys are one of culture’s greatest mistake-factories, and anyone wanting to see smart decision-making should have been watching Sherlock.
No, I hate Macklemore and Ryan Lewis because I think their music is terrible at best, and worse than terrible at worst. It’s the lowest sort of middlebrow, an art-like commodity that shallow people think is deep and dull people think is edgy.
The city that blessed us with Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana has now cursed us with the rap game Upworthy: a man hawking hip-hop that switches out faked emotion for real intellect and faked intellect for real emotion and has no discernible goals other than to congratulate its makers for making it and its listeners for purchasing it.
The Heist is a lavish dumbscape of plodding quarter-note grooves, Chopsticks-style piano loops, pointless choirs singing about nothing. Lewis’ beats are kitchen sinks of bad ideas, tin-eared imprecision mistaking itself for eclecticism.
His crate-digging seems to start at a Feist song he once heard on an Apple commercial and end at the music JetBlue plays before the TVs turn on. And it’s all a backdrop for Macklemore’s contrived flows and mirror-practiced charisma; even his punny pop-culture references – the last refuge of every eager-beaver dorm room M.C. – are amazingly dull.
Can’t Hold Us boasts references to Bob Barker, Michael Jackson, Wu-Tang Clan and Shark Week, touchstones so obvious their sole purpose is to assure the audience that Macklemore has heard of things they’ve heard of, to pat them on the back for knowing what they already know.
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The album’s opening track, Ten Thousand Hours, takes its title from a clich
