There was a time around 2012 when you couldn’t walk three feet without hearing the Seattle rapper Macklemore. His infectious cultural earworm “Thrift Shop” hit number one on the U.S. charts seemingly overnight, and along with its colorful video, it perfectly captured the feeling of the time. Then came “Can’t Hold Us,” another number one smash, followed up by “Same Love,” a gay anthem that also captured the spirit of the direction of popular culture. He was everywhere, then he kind of just, went away. So what happened to Macklemore? Read on to find out.
It felt like he came out of nowhere and all of a sudden he was the biggest thing ever, and it happened so fast. Before you knew it, he was living every musician’s dreams. He was on the cover of magazines, on TV shows, and his songs were in movies. His album The Heist went multi platinum and he, along with Ryan Lewis, became the best selling independent artists of all time. The truth is never as fun as the fiction, and the truth is that Macklemore worked his way up to the top through touring and recording and building an online following.
Once they had enough money, they decided to eschew the normal record company route and just produce their album themselves, something unheard of at the time. He rode that wave to the Grammys, won rap record of the year, and then the backlash started. Macklemore got popular because, or in spite of, his earnestness. It can come off as corny. While his hits were radio bangers, a lot of his other songs are earnest diatribes about addiction, or being in high school, or some other specific thing. A lot of people liked that, and a lot didn’t. When he stopped making club anthems, perhaps unsurprisingly he didn’t do as well.
The Rise of Macklemore
Macklemore, real name Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, grew up on Capitol Hill in Seattle. He took ballet lessons as a kid in solidarity with another kid who was being bullied, on the advice of his social worker mom. He went to Garfield High School. He started rapping and then he got into drinking, and for a while the two went hand in hand. By the time he got to college he was doing mushrooms, and in 2005 he released an album on his own called The Language of My World. It gave him some cachet in the local scene, and his popularity began to grow.
Then he met his then partner Ryan Lewis, and they decided they would make a go at this whole music thing on their own. T-shirts, posters, you name it — they did it all themselves. Then major labels came calling after they noticed how popular he was getting, as he was selling out in cities all over the country. While they didn’t go the major label route, they did cut a deal for distribution with Alternative Distribution Alliance, an arm of Warner Music Group. This got the song in stores, and on iTunes (remember that?) and on Warner Bros. radio. Things ballooned from there.
Both “Can’t Hold Us” and “Thrift Shop” were number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The album debuted at number two. It was nine years of hard work but they did it. They got everything anyone could want.
The Grammy Fiasco
Grammy night was supposed to take Macklemore to even further heights. It was supposed to be his Michael Jackson moment. It almost was. He performed his hit “Same Love,” now a gay anthem, with Mary Lambert and Madonna. Queen Latifah officiated 33 gay weddings at once on stage. It was meant to be historic, and it could’ve been, until it was overshadowed by one unfortunate thing: Winning a Grammy for the best rap album of the year.
For some reason, that was too much. People could handle this fun pop rapper, but winning rap album over Kendrick Lamar? That was unacceptable. People turned on him very fast. To make matters worse, Macklemore posted a screenshot of a text he sent to Lamar, telling him he’d been robbed. It felt corny and forced. It felt like he was trying to make up for his imposter syndrome. It would be the last time he reached those heights (as of this writing).
Earlier this year in an interview with Lyndsanity!, he said he never really had any sort of imposter syndrome. He said he knows he makes “really good music that resonates with people,” and that he knows “why” people like it. At the time, he said, he felt like Kendrick should have won, but he was only apologizing for the rap album.
“… there’s a reason why those Grammys are on my shelf. There’s a reason why I’ve been able to resonate with human beings around the world and have a career. It’s because I’ve put in the sweat equity into something that I’ve been passionate about since I was 7 years old. I just think that there was so much drama and built-up tension, and me coming off of a relapse, that I didn’t know how to handle it at the time.”
His career never really recovered, or got to anywhere near that level again. When the follow up This Unruly Mess I’ve Made came out in 2016, it mostly flopped. One single, called “Downtown,” did kind of okay, but that was it. Shortly after that, he announced that he was breaking up with Ryan Lewis. He announced the split in an Instagram post: “After the last tour, Ryan and I agreed that some creative space would be good for the both of us. Ryan Lewis is my brother forever. We have been working together damn near every day for 9 years and it felt like the right time.”
What’s Macklemore doing now?
He’s still making music and touring! In fact, he never really stopped. He released an album in 2017 called Gemini, sans Ryan Lewis, and it was… fine. The reviews were pretty soft. Pitchfork said it feels “like he’s shrunk back down to an appropriate size.” Last year he released Ben, and released five singles in all. None of them charted and the album is… fine. He still has fans, he can still live his dream, and now he doesn’t have to worry about “making it.”
He puts it this way: “Now I’m just under the radar, but I’m able to do what I love and still get in front of arenas around the world filled with people that can sing these songs with me. And that’s what it’s all about.”
