Though Haggerty campaigns that being gay is ok, he makes a concerted effort to prove to his audience that he isn’t gay.
#GROWING UP MACKLEMORE AZ LYRICS SERIES#
In a series of now-deleted tweets from his personal Twitter account, Le1f angrily wrote of, “that time that straight white dude ripped off my song then made a video about gay interracial love and made a million dollars.” Despite the two songs being eerily similar, Le1f has found little commercial success with Wut, only performing on Late Show with David Letterman long after Thrift Shop reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and sold 7 million copies in the United States. Played side by side, it’s undeniable that the structure and beats from the two songs are strikingly similar.
Jamieson Cox, a gay music contributor for Buzzfeed writes,“ A lot of people would rather see queer rappers given equal media treatment instead of all the focus on yet another straight white dude.” Black and openly gay rapper Le1f (who himself often raps about being gay) that Haggerty ripped off his song Wut in their massively successful song Thrift Shop. Haggerty acknowledges his white privilege in his earlier song, White Privilege:Īnd white rappers albums really get the most spins /The face of hip hop has changed a lot since Eminem/And if he’s taking away black artists’ profits I look just like him/Claimed a culture that wasn’t mine, the way of the American/Hip Hop is gentrified and where will all the people liveĭespite this acknowledgement, he does little to take steps to rectify the situation and instead continues to benefit from it. Other black rap artists, including Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, and Queen Latifah additionally have voiced their support for gay rights, but none have received nearly the attention Haggerty has. It’s no different than discriminating against blacks. …what people do in their own homes is their business, and you can choose to love whoever you love. Jay-Z spoke of his feelings about the fight against gay marriage in a 2012 interview on CNN that he’s, “…always thought it as something that was still…holding the country back.” He continued, It’s possible that both he and DeGeneres were either unaware of the genre at the time or that they perhaps meant mainstream hip hop, it’s not as if other rap artists haven’t spoken publicly in favor for gay rights. In fact, there’s an entire sub-genre of hip-hop composed of queer artists known as “Homo Hop,” which Haggerty completely ignores with his lyric, “If I were gay, I would think hip-hop hates me.” When Macklemore, whose real name is Ben Haggerty, preformed Same Love on The Ellen DeGeneres Show she announced the duo saying, “Here’s why you need to care about our next guest: no other artist in hip-hop history has ever taken the stand defending marriage equality the way they have.” Her proclamation isn’t actually true. Same Love almost certainly wouldn’t have gotten so much attention had they not been, for the fact that these are men who live outside of the world of the minorities that might have been expected to produce a pro-gay rap. Macklemore & Ryan Lewis are straight, male, and white. In a song that discusses gay rights in a largely black-dominated genre, we can’t certainly can’t discuss one without the other. Ferguson asserts in his essay The Relevance of Race for the Study of Sexuality “race and sexuality are mutually constitutive” (pg 109), that is, that race and sexuality are intersectional. It’s impossible to discuss either the racial or sexual issues surrounding the song without first noting that, as Roderick A.
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