Macklemore won four Grammys this year, including Best Rap Album (Alaina Buzas)

Macklemore’s been getting a lot of heat lately.

After the rap artist swept the Grammys, and subsequently posted a screenshot of a text sent to Kendrick Lamar, saying that Macklemore believed Kendrick “got robbed” and “should have won,” the internet exploded. People have been criticizing Macklemore for almost everything, from his apology, to his clothes, to the Grammys that he apparently “didn’t deserve”. He’s been called unauthentic, arrogant, “wack as fuck” (in the words of fellow rapper Drake) and, perhaps worst of all, the epitome of white privilege.

My question, though, is simple: why all the hate, and does Macklemore really deserve it?

Let’s start with winning the Grammys. Macklemore (and his musical partner Ryan Lewis) received four Grammy Awards this year, for Best New Artist, Best Rap Album, Best Rap Performance and Best Rap Song. This sparked huge backlash on the internet from fans of other rappers (like Kanye and Kendrick) who believed that Macklemore didn’t deserve Best Rap Album.

Then, when Macklemore posted a public apology, basically saying that he agreed with those critics and that he, indeed, didn’t deserve the Best Rap Album Grammy, he was slammed even further. It was one thing for random Macklemore fans, followers, or “haters” to comment on his apology picture, which he posted on his Instagram; but, for other rappers to publicly denounce Macklemore for his apology is quite another.

Drake, in a feature for the newest issue of Rolling Stone, was asked his opinion on Macklemore’s apology, and used it as an opportunity to rip Macklemore to shreds.

“That shit was wack as fuck”, Drake said, ever-so eloquently. “[Macklemore needs] to just chill… it felt cheap. It didn’t feel genuine.” Drake also had an issue with Macklemore texting only Lamar; as he said, “To name just Kendrick? That shit made me feel funny… in that case, you robbed everybody. We all need text messages!”

Let’s take a step back for a second. Drake, more than anything, sounds jealous - jealous that he didn’t get a Grammy nod, perhaps, or jealous that Macklemore never thought to text him acknowledging him as the better rapper.

But, jealousy aside, who is Drake to be talking to Macklemore about authenticity? Drake was born in 1986, and by the early 2000s had already gained recognition as an actor, playing Jimmy Brooks on “Degrassi: The Next Generation.” It’s reasonable to assume that, due to his status as a child star, Drake was pretty well-off throughout most of his life, but this is the man whose most recent hit enthralls listeners with tales of “starting from the bottom.” I don’t know if Drake is just trying to be like every other rapper who talks about “the streets,” regardless of where they were raised, but for him to then turn around and call Macklemore “cheap” and “[in]genuine” is ridiculous.

It’s not just Drake who has lashed out at Macklemore and questioned his authenticity. Critics, like Slate’s Jack Hamilton, have recently been targeting Macklemore’s “Same Love” as a further example of Macklemore’s hypocrisy and arrogance. Macklemore has been blasted for writing “Same Love” as a gay marriage anthem while refusing to address his own “white, heteronormative privilege” and for elevating himself above all other rappers for being the only non-homophobe in the bunch (despite the fact that, of course, he’s not). Hamilton states that, through “Same Love,“ Macklemore doesn’t “actually take a stand” on homophobia in hip-hop and that Macklemore’s inauthenticity is such that he appears “...like the white kid in the front row of the Af-Am Studies class, droning on about his own radicalism, convinced he’s the only one in the room with Dead Prez on his iPhone.” Hamilton goes even further, stating that “...if there’s a better example of ‘white privilege’ in the music biz in 2014, I can’t think of one.”

First, in “Same Love” Macklemore does address the fact that he is not gay: in the first lines, in fact, Macklemore raps that when he was young he thought, wrongly, that he was. This is not Macklemore pretending to identify with a group of people that he does not belong to; rather, it’s a comment on the negative consequences that stereotypes of sexuality can have on people, particularly children, whether they are straight or gay. As for arrogance or radicalism, Macklemore never claimed to be an activist in “Same Love”; that is, unless pointing out the issues of inequality in American popular culture and politics is considered being an activist. Macklemore bravely paints a picture for a new world with less hate, just as artists like Marvin Gaye did in his classic “What’s Goin’ On?” For this very reason, I am wholly unsurprised that he has been met with almost nothing but hate in response; after all, it is an uncomfortable trend in American culture that those who speak out the most against hatred are hatred’s biggest targets.

When it comes to “Same Love,” I am biased, and I admit that. I came out during the very same summer that the song reached Billboard’s Top 100 list and remained there for thirty weeks, peaking at #11. That summer, it seemed like “Same Love” was on every radio station, every hour of every day; it was the soundtrack to my (and my family’s) comprehension of my sexuality. It was the song that led my mother to send me the first message of outright support that I ever got - a text in which she wrote that she had been listening to the song, and it had helped her to realize that she wanted to support me. It was the song that I cried to whenever I was stared at for holding my girlfriend’s hand and whenever I was told that I was “just confused.”

Don’t get me wrong here: musically, “Same Love” is no masterpiece. I realize that Ryan Lewis’s beats are not the best or most unique thing that the genre has ever seen. I understand that Macklemore’s lyrics aren’t the most inventive; in fact, some of them are pretty cliche. And, even more than I understand these things, I understand this: Macklemore is not gay. Macklemore is white. And, Macklemore is a man. I am not straight. I am not a man. Yet I identify with Macklemore because I understand where his intentions lie. Macklemore is not trying to infiltrate the gay community, or say he’s gay, or even say that he understands what it is like to be gay. Rather, Macklemore is trying to give voice to a topic that many people won’t talk about. He’s not the first or the last artist to discuss gay marriage or homophobia. But, he might be the most popular one to do so, and, because of this, may very well be the only voice of support and hope that a gay kid hears. And this alone is enough for me to believe that Macklemore deserves support. At the very least, he does not deserve the barrage of insults he receives every time he succeeds or tries to show support for another rapper or a marginalized group of people.

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