{"id":2876,"date":"2014-01-27T02:32:01","date_gmt":"2014-01-27T02:32:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/home\/?p=2876"},"modified":"2014-01-27T02:32:01","modified_gmt":"2014-01-27T02:32:01","slug":"on-macklemore-rap-grammys-and-how-we-misconstrue-white-privilege","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/on-macklemore-rap-grammys-and-how-we-misconstrue-white-privilege\/","title":{"rendered":"On Macklemore, Rap Grammys and How We Misconstrue White Privilege"},"content":{"rendered":"

[dropcap]M[\/dropcap]usic\u2019s Biggest Night was last night\u2014a curious phrase to be throwing around the first month of the year, considering that it implies that from here on out, 2014 is Music\u2019s never-ending Sunday. And surely by now you\u2019ve heard that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis\u2014the former, a white rapper who looks a little bit like a squash<\/a>; the latter, the most timid hypeman in music history\u2014nabbed a number of choice awards, most provocatively that of Best Rap Album.<\/p>\n

Unless you\u2019re my friend\u2019s mother, Karen, who was most likely drunk off of two white wine spritzers last night, and has been playing the artist\u2019s debut album The Heist<\/i> all year, you may have some queasy feelings about the win, and its ties to appropriation, white privilege, and a host of other buzzwords that have successfully penetrated mainstream conversation the way \u201cincome inequality\u201d and \u201chow are we still talking about abortions<\/i>\u201d did the 2012 Election season.<\/p>\n

Of course white privilege will always play a roll in Macklemore\u2019s success. When he eventually is able to have a clothing line, become a product pusher, and just generally dip his toe in each and every facet of the mainstream that he so chooses, the literal lack of sweats he will have broken will speak more to his whiteness than anything else. Rappers have built reputations on struggle: for Jay, it\u2019s rooted in his past a drug pusher and street hustler; for Kanye, its rooted in his present as an artist who has hit a ceiling.<\/p>\n

Macklemore, on the other hand, looks like someone named Donnie who probably got a wrestling scholarship. His shackles seem to exclusively orbit around being called gay in third grade, and possibly being on PETA\u2019s shit list for all the fur he rocks. Other than that, the Macklemore narrative is comically accessible, something hip-hop is still considered beyond being.<\/p>\n

This discussion, as with most discussions, is worth having\u2014once. In the era of the 24-hour-news cycle, and the literal peek of the thinkpiece bubble, much time is being given to what the implications<\/i> of Macklemore\u2019s win are. The talk unsurprisingly seems to revolve around Macklemore himself: what he does or does not represent in a cultural space that might or might not be interested in having him around. And Macklemore himself seems to get it too. Late last night, sometime after the awards, Macklemore texted 2013\u2019s rap wunderkind Kendrick Lamar, telling him that the critical darling was robbed of the Best Rap Album Grammy he clearly deserved. Macklemore then went on to post the text on Instagram, with a caption roughly the length of the text itself, assumedly explaining to hip hop lovers that he somehow gets it\u2014his place in all this. Fair enough. Tacky, hilariously insincere the minute he tapped \u201cpost\u201d, but all around a nice move.<\/p>\n

Jon Caramanica\u2019s piece for The New York Times\u2019<\/i>\u2019s Critic\u2019s Notebook<\/a>, however, found offense at the apology because of course it did, and made sure to note that Macklemore\u2019s apology was for Lamar losing the Best Rap Grammy, and not an endorsement of Lamar for Album of the Year\u2014which both he and Macklemore were nominated for. Of course Macklemore didn\u2019t win Album of the Year, and thus had very little \u201cyou were robbed\u201d-ing to do, and had he made the point of telling Lamar he also deserved Album of the Year, there is a good chance The New Yorker<\/i> would have still ran this piece, this time under the auspiciously re-configured thesis that Macklemore was a brownnoser desperate to get in hip hop\u2019s good graces. There is, it seems, no winning once you\u2019ve won.<\/p>\n

[blockquote]”If you\u2019re going to try and process what the meaning of the Macklemore Grammy nabbing is, it\u2019s that the Grammys are still (still!) awarding shitty music.[\/blockquote]<\/p>\n

As a true lover of hip hop, and a member of (double!) minority status\u2014one of which Macklemore has somehow become the bastion of\u2014the reactions to these Grammy wins are accurately being held up as incredulous, but not for the right reasons. The fact is that the most obvious answers always tend to be the most true: Macklemore\u2019s music isn\u2019t good<\/i>. It\u2019s not good music. The music isn\u2019t that good.<\/i> So if you\u2019re going to try and process what the meaning of the Macklemore Grammy nabbing is, it\u2019s that the Grammys are still (still!) awarding shitty music.<\/p>\n

The problem with loaded discussions of culture mining is that they chip away ever-so-slightly at the value of a culture\u2019s good taste. The more we move away from the simple, unavoidable truth\u2014that bad music is on par with offensive people, becausebad music should offend us<\/i>\u2014the more our culture reaches a point of no return. I value taste; the culture should have it, and be willing to assess the broader discussions of meaning (especially in a world where news and power are circulated through images); but the discussion surrounding something as petty as industry-backpatting-disguised-as-awards (didn\u2019t all of Lorde\u2019s Grammy wins somehow feel like they were equally for the label heads that \u201cnailed it\u201d?) gives them a secondary meaning in the abstract: Macklemore won because ______, and this is bad because ______.<\/p>\n

The Grammys have done a disservice, but reactionary claims of white privilege do little to get at the heart of the problem here, especially when you consider that there is no white privilege to be found in hip hop\u2014not when its purists are ready to sound the alarm at the very sight of invasion. And in case Karen, the Macklemore fan who loves white wine spritzers, was wondering: Eminem did not break down any glass ceilings. His power as a lyricist was always that he spoke, still, through rap\u2019s greatest framework, telling stories about minority status, police brutality, the effect of drugs and alcohol in the home space, and the lifelong trappings of class. Eminem appropriated, but his authenticity was never too hotly debated. A Detroit trailer park, it seems, wasn\u2019t too different from the predominantly black neighborhoods that littered east coast and west coast rap narratives.<\/p>\n

What this all \u201cmeans\u201d is that the Grammy\u2019s reputation for being, historically speaking, unable to understand the value of hip-hop is still firmly in place, and largely the only thing worth worrying about. Some of contemporary music\u2019s most highly regarded albums (think genre mainstays like Illimatic<\/i>) and most revered icons (Tupac, Biggie, now Kendrick) have gone comically unrecognized, and the notion of agency has little to nothing to do with it.<\/p>\n

Macklemore\u2019s Grammy win for Best Rap Album isn\u2019t a blind side; it\u2019s the result of a steady domino effect that first came when hip-hop began to immerse itself with pop music and its now resulted in rap music that you could play in a minivan, in a commercial for steak, inside of a Kohls, or as the police drive by. This emphasis on accessibility and genre-mobility gives clearance to award coffee-shop rap. Macklemore\u2019s Grammys, thus, become the result of the age-old issue of the Grammys notgetting<\/i> it. There is little separating a Macklemore Grammy and a Jay Z Grammy in 2014. Notions of authenticity are moot when the product leaves little lasting power.<\/p>\n

Macklemore winning any award is nonsense, because his music doesn\u2019t deserve awards. Macklemore winning a Rap Grammy is nonsense, because it is not good hip-hop. Aside from that most black-and-white (wait) bit of analysis, there is little else to unpack. We\u2019re left with a surprising amount of unsurprising data. The facts are front and center. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterically naked, shaking their heads at the wrong thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[dropcap]M[\/dropcap]usic\u2019s Biggest Night was last night\u2014a curious phrase to be throwing around the first month of the year, considering that it implies that from here on out, 2014 is Music\u2019s never-ending Sunday. And surely by now you\u2019ve heard that Macklemore & Ryan Lewis\u2014the former, a white rapper who looks a little bit like a squash; the latter, the most timid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":2882,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[49],"tags":[56,57,58,59],"class_list":["post-2876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-awards-show","tag-grammys","tag-macklemore","tag-ryan-lewis"],"acf":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paoQFa-Ko","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2876"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2876\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/notofu.com\/new\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}