In an anonymous ware-house building on the Seattle waterfront, a chart-topping rapper and his musical partner are considering jam. The topic of fruit preserves is not, in truth, one that Macklemore — aka Ben Haggerty — and Ryan Lewis tend to discuss and, in this instance, it is a metaphor for choice. Say you head to the jam aisle in a shop and are too overwhelmed by the selection to make a purchase; can you be said to have a choice if you are unable to exercise it?
“And even if you can buy one, you’re going by which is the most expensive jam,” Haggerty says. “Or the one that has the biggest sign in front of it,” Ryan adds. “But you don’t have time to dissect them,” Haggerty continues. “Or the taste buds to decide which you prefer.” “You want someone to just give you some f****** jam,” Lewis suggests. “Which is basically what the music industry is,” Haggerty says. “And radio is the jam selector. And the five brands radio pushes are the ones the public gets familiar with. Not necessarily the best.”
When the pair first broke through in 2012 with the single Thrift Shop and the album The Heist, they were very much one of those five brands: Thrift Shop sold more than 10m copies around the world; The Heist was a multiplatinum success and, controversially, pipped Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, Maad City for the best rap album award at the 2014 Grammys (Haggerty subsequently texted Lamar to apologise).
The problem for many rap fans, never mind rap musicians, was that the five brands at that time seemed to be made up almost entirely of white rappers, including the Australian Iggy Azalea, who also received a Grammy nomination. Azealia Banks was one of many black artists to cry foul over cultural appropriation, and Forbes ran the provocative headline: “Hip-hop is run by a white, blonde, Australian woman.”
For some, the hovering insinuation of “not necessarily the best”, and the accusation of appropriation, has attached itself to M&L ever since. Such doubters cite the larkier side of the duo’s output (Thrift Shop is exhibit A), while ignoring much riskier songs such as their Same Love, which celebrated the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Washington state and still managed to be a huge hit. On M&L’s engrossing new album, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, such doubters are provided with further ammunition.
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The album was previewed last summer with the bizarre single Downtown, a song — think Wham Rap! melded with J Geils Band’s 1981 hit Centerfold — that flirted with structural collapse, and was unashamedly cheesy (and, let’s be honest, enormous fun). Downtown was followed in January by the handbrake turn of White Privilege II, an eight-minute-plus track that wrestled with the burning issue of police violence against the black community, using spoken word, vox pop and multiple music genres to look the issue — and their right to comment on it — square in the face. The song even namechecks Azalea, though Haggerty denies that’s deflective. “I’m in there, too. We were, are, all part of that conversation, and rightfully so.”
Confused? Plenty were. To their credit, M&L don’t shirk this. “Our music has always had that mix,” says Haggerty. “A wide spectrum of subject matter, textures, influences. I can see that can become problematic, that it can seem too jarring. If you have White Privilege II and Downtown on the same album, people may not know which box to put you in. Well, I don’t know what box to put my life in — because it’s both of those. I can’t pick three songs on this album that define my existence. I’d have to pick all 13. That’s what we chose to write about — because that’s what’s going on.”
“I don’t know what box to put my life in
What’s going on on This Unruly Mess I’ve Made includes not just White Privilege II and Downtown, but songs as powerful and uncompromising as Kevin, and as lairy and daft as Brad Pitt’s Cousin. Kevin was written after a friend of Haggerty’s took a fatal overdose, after years of addiction to painkillers; its chorus, on which Leon Bridges sings, “Doctor, please, give me a dose of the American Dream”, is one of the most chilling moments on the album. Far away on the other side of the M&L spectrum, Brad Pitt’s Cousin describes, with unconcealed disgust, the velvet-rope world The Heist ushered them into. And a song called Let’s Eat? Well, it’s a joky, bloky homage to scarfing trans fats that will have the duo’s detractors dipping their tweets in vitriol.
Too bad, say M&L; they’re not apologising. Besides, there are far more important things to talk about. The context into which This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is being released, for one. Donald Trump seemingly about to wrap up the Republican nomination; heroin and homelessness ravaging their Seattle home town, as elsewhere; the bitter standoff between movements such as Black Lives Matter and legislators who would love to turn back the clock on civil rights. And what should our response be, asks Haggerty. A whole album of Thrift Shops?
“This world, this industry, is constantly telling you, ‘Care about this. This is the measure of success, this is what it looks like.’ You have to stay really connected to why you make art, what its intent is.” “We have no idea how to figure it out,” Lewis adds. “It’s just important for us that we continue to understand the relationship between us and the machine, and how much we negotiate that. The new record is going to be listened to in this intense bubble of context. It’s not an album where you can go, ‘It belongs in this bucket’, and just press Play and pick up where you left off. It’s more challenging than that.”
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There are conversations to be had, they say, but dissecting Let’s Eat isn’t one of them. “Police brutality against black people in America is the very fabric from which our country was created,” says Lewis. “We have put temporary Band-Aids over that, but the fabric hasn’t changed.” “And,” Haggerty adds, “we have a generation in this country that’s been raised on Adderall, Ritalin — ADD medication. They’ve effectively been on speed since they were seven years old.”
And you’re choosing to use your position to ignore the dollar signs and talk about this? “Choosing? It’s not a choice,” says Haggerty. “It’s a necessity.”
This Unruly Mess I’ve Made is out now