This ran just after Spring Fling when GWU had Macklemore come through. I didn’t go; I had work to do.
Disclaimer: This is #controversycolumn ½. I call it such because it was the first where my point was completely perverted and wrrrecked by the edits made. And, you know, that’s fine for The Hatchet. And I’ll acknowledge that each of the #controversycolumns is just dripping with bitterness. But since this is my backwater blog, I’m going to post my favorite draft of the process from these two #controversycolumns after the version that ran in The Hatchet. And it’s not (totally) a vanity thing. In each of these two columns, my point was just DRASTICALLY different than what came out. So, yeah, I’ll throw my shit in. Me, me, me, me; my, my, my, my.
This weekend, rapper Macklemore was the entertainment of choice at Spring Fling. And while many students were excited for his performance, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes.
His fans treat him as though he has changed the face of music and steered the rap genre into unknown territory. But in reality, Macklemore is farcically emblematic of the cultural vampirism – or borrowing of other sources – that our entire generation is guilty of.
Macklemore provides a case study in hilariously hypocritical lyricism. His song “Thrift Shop” is quite literally an ode to the re-appropriation of last year’s utile items.
He fits into well-tread territory – almost a hackneyed cliche: the outsider white rapper who speaks to a different subject matter than the mainstream of the genre.
But if one looks at the content of his music, it’s just a postmodern derivation of the culture of consumption that has always defined rap. In “Thrift Shop,” our blonde-coiffed emcee takes digs at expensive shirts from Gucci without ever realizing the irony that his focus on the thrift shop is to one-up the Gucci-wearer, an escalating game of fashion brinkmanship between two competing classes.
My generation’s apparent fascination with him and his song “Thrift Shop” belies a much more insidious quality in us. He fully embraces the culture of postmodern reappropriation. His novelty is intentional and targeted.
Macklemore writes a song that most perceive to be a swipe at wanton consumerism, while couching it in the necessity of further consumerism. He, just like everyone else, is image-obsessed. By sifting through piles of clothes at a thrift shop, he too is participating in consumer culture even though it is the very thing he critiques.
To wit, in the song “Make the Money” he relies on the internet-birthed insularity of his audience to follow his brand of rhyming: “What I really need is a job off Craigslist/ Take away the dot com, name, love/ Fans, Twitter followers, and the buzz/ See, you keep the issues but you take away the drugs.”
If this reads as a joke rap, then it hits the mark. But his focus on existing as a mainstream artist instead of a long-form gag is the problem: The disposable has become our culture – even down to the repurposed clothes from the thrift shop.
His lyrics consist of name drops pointed at the market share of technologically-literate 20-somethings. That’s not art: It’s inside jokes and cloistered music microtargeting set to a beat and recorded for release.
Macklemore could only exist now because our generation is so uncreative and self-absorbed that we accept lyrics that openly refer to Craigslist and our Twitter feeds.
Thinking about Macklemore’s larger meaning within the context of popular culture makes his presence at GW all the more frustrating. This is not to say he is a risky choice — quite the opposite. But as his lyrics demonstrate, he is emblematic of a generation that is lacking when it comes to producing original and fresh creative content.
I’ve heard it all a thousand times before.
Trevor Marsden is a junior majoring in philosophy.
(Note: I wanted them to remove the major. They would not.)
_______________________________________________
As I age and begin to set my gaze beyond the boundaries of Foggy Bottom, I have little crises now and again—momentary flashes of anxiety wondering if I am really “getting old.” It seems that my challenge in the last year of college will be a battle with the misanthrope in the back of my head that commands me to ignore your societal trappings. But, alas, the man outside of the state is either god or beast and being that I am neither, I sometimes come in contact with what one could reasonably deem our “popular culture.” Further, as near as I can understand it, some newfangled rapper from the Pacific Northwest will be the entertainment of choice at Spring Fling. I am not a fan.
Macklemore is almost farcically emblematic of the cultural vampirism that our entire generation is guilty of. While one could chalk it up to him being the logical end of the 2010’s hipster-aesthetic applied to rap, reducing his shtick—and his appeal—to mere hipsterism is reductive and dangerous. My generation’s apparent fascination with him, and his song “Thrift Shop” belies a much more insidious quality in us; where once successive generations only borrowed certain aesthetic themes from prior ones, ours is apparently content to literally re-appropriate—down to the actual material objects of generations and fads past—our ancestor’s trash. What they say about “one-man’s-trash…” is certainly an admirable credo when it comes to waste production and sequestration, but defining an entire generational culture based off of “TimeCop”-style theft is just sort of bleak to me.
Macklemore is, himself, a hackneyed cliché—the outsider white rapper who speaks to a different, “more alternative” (read: for white folk) subject matter than the mainstream of the genre—but if one looks at the content of his rap, it’s just a post-modern derivation of the conspicuous consumption that has always defined rap. Within “Thrift Shop,” our blonde-coiffed MC takes digs at the expensive shirts from Gucci without ever realizing the irony that his focus on the thrift shop is to one-up the Gucci-wearer while undercutting his price—thus becoming an escalating game of nuclear fashion brinksmanship between two competing classes. This is his most insidious aspect of this song and the hypocritical reason everyone claims to like it: he writes a song that most perceive to be a swipe at wanton consumerism, while couching it in the necessity of further consumerism in order to subordinate consumerism. The ghost of Karl Marx is beating his head against chapter 31 of Capital over and over again, somewhere out in the dimensional ether.
So, while I may dislike Macklemore, I’ve decided, here at the end of this column, that he is the perfect act for GW to bring to Spring Fling. Flashy and bereft of substance, disgustingly concerned with material possessions whilst purporting not to be, and generally a re-hashing of better, previously established rivals—GW and Macklemore are a match made in heaven.