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“That was a big turning point for me.” But if he was going to speak out, he and Lewis felt that they needed to gather more knowledge first. “He told me that silence is action, and you are being silent right now,” says Macklemore. In a search for perspective, Macklemore called a widely respected older rapper (whom he declines to name) and asked for advice. If I said the wrong thing, that would be a bigger story than me supporting it.” “I had been silent out of not wanting to mess up, out of a fear of saying the wrong thing. “The night of the nonindictment was the biggest one in terms of realizing I had been silent out of fear,” he says. You’re like, ‘Whatever I say in the media, they’re going to take it way” - it becomes about another artist, and the intention is never received in the way it was intended.”īut by November 2014, Macklemore found himself compelled to speak out when a grand jury declined to indict former Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson for the killing of Michael Brown. “When you mess up publicly,” Macklemore now says about the incident, “it can be difficult to get vulnerable again or to put yourself out there. But at the 2014 Grammys, Macklemore’s advantages came awkwardly to the fore when The Heist beat out Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D City for rap album of the year, and Macklemore texted Lamar saying, “You got robbed” - and then, even worse, Instagrammed the text. In 2012, the same year as their breakthrough, they advocated for gay marriage with the Heist single “Same Love,” which featured lesbian singer Mary Lambert. They released “White Privilege,” the predecessor to their most recent song, back in 2005. But all along, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis have incorporated progressive concepts into their music. White privilege made him more palatable to pop fans and Madison Avenue alike - and, as statistics around white teenagers and policing indicate, it made him far less likely to get arrested back when he was a teenager who, as he has admitted, sold weed. Meanwhile, Macklemore won endorsement deals with the NBA and Dr. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, where it sat for six weeks, eventually selling 7.9 million copies, according to Nielsen Music. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis were just an indie Seattle-area rap duo in 2012 when their playful, consumerist-critiquing single “Thrift Shop” unexpectedly rocketed to No. In January, with his producer and musical partner Ryan Lewis, 27, Macklemore previewed the new album This Unruly Mess I’ve Made by dropping a nine-minute song called “White Privilege II.” Macklemore is, at first blush, the wrong guy to tackle white privilege, because he benefits so much from it. Sitting in his room at New York’s Hudson Hotel one Wednesday morning, he wears pristine caramel-brown suede boots, fashionably ripped jeans and a green corduroy shirt over a tee depicting the new-age artist Yanni. And - here’s the punchline - he’s insecure about his white privilege. He graduated from Evergreen State College. Macklemore, the 32-year-old born Ben Haggerty, is like a black comedian’s caricature of a white rapper: He looks like a real-life Bart Simpson.
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