topreventmyselffromgettingmoredrugs.”
Hisgazedropstothefloor.“I’mabouttogo
ontheroadtonight.I’vebeeninthisplace
ofjust,like,mybusinessandmycareerand
whatIneed,andit’sthatself-willthatleads
me to sickness. I’m not living the program.
I’vebeensittingherelistening,showingup
late, leaving early, trying to get something
outofthis,butI’mnot.Ihavetodothe
work.Ineedtothinkaboutotherpeople,
becauseifIonlythinkaboutmyself,Iwill
getloadedagain.”
“Callus,”someonesays.“Callus,”other
voices arm.
Aguyinsandalspipesup,sayshe’ssent
Macklemore texts in the past and that he
hasn’t written him back – but it’s all good,
he’sstillgotloveforhim.Macklemorepurs-
eshislipsandnods.
‘
I
’d r at h er no t l ist sobr i-
ety times,” says Macklemore
when I ask him, afterward,
how long he’s been clean.
“What’s important is to say,
‘I’m fucked up, I’ve been
fucked up, I’ve lied.’ I’ve been
living a program of recovery for a year and
a half, and 99 per cent of the time it’s been
going great.” He adds, “I’ll be sitting in
that hall, feeling fucking miserable with a
Rolex on my wrist, a Cadillac in the park-
ing lot and a house on Capitol Hill. And I
look around the room and see people more
spiritually connected and fulfi lled than I
am, and have far more serenity and peace
in their life.”
He draws a line from what just hap-
pened at the meeting to his own artistic
goals: “Watching a man cry in front of a
room of people, apologise and leave with
more power and respect, in a true way? I
strive for that when I make music. Write
draft one, then tear it up and go deep-
er. Dig. When someone’s truthful, it sets
the room on fi re. So for me, whether I’m
sharing or writing a song, my question is,
‘What am I hiding?’ That’s exactly what I
need to say.”
The next stop is a rehearsal space in the
city’s Industrial District. Lewis is there,
wearing skinny jeans and chunky eyeglass-
es. His audacious, genre- jumbling produc-
tions and handiness with a big melody are
Macklemore’s semi- secret weapon. At the
moment, Lewis is leading a small band
through the duo’s 2010 recovery narrative
“Otherside”. “For shits, can we scrap that
horn line and try to come up with some-
thing more staccato?” Macklemore asks.
Assenting, Lewis bleats out a new cadence
with his mouth, and Owuor Arunga – the
duo’s trumpeter and Macklemore’s old high
school friend – replicates it expertly.
The idea for this tour is to start small
- playing theatres with about seven buses
and a 50-person crew, “spending about
$70,000 to $80,000 a show and coming
out a little bit ahead”, according to Quil-
len – before doubling in scale for a Euro-
pean arena tour. They want the theatre
shows to feel special, and so no song is safe
from change.
Work on This Unruly Mess I’ve Made
began in 2014 and progressed slowly, both
because of Macklemore’s personal trou-
bles and the duo’s ambitions. Lewis, fl ush
with Heist cash, splurged on sounds: For
the opening alone – a song called “Light
Tunnels” – he hired the Seahawks’ drum
line, a choir, a “12-to-15-piece string sec-
tion”, a harpist and a dulcimer player. The
song took more than a year to fi nish. Mack-
lemore, meanwhile, tried to overcome writ-
er’s block with stream-of-consciousness ex-
ercises he’d perform on a typewriter – an
idea inspired by a book called The Artist’s
Way: “It was imperative for me to just get
the cobwebs out.” The duo drew from their
Heist earnings to build their own recording
spaces, and so the album, despite the elab-
orateness of its making, “cost less than a
comparable sophomore album would have
at a major label”, Quillen says. “They spent
less than $500,000.”
On Macklemore’s fi rst solo album, titled
Open Your Eyes and self-recorded when
he was about 17, he balanced psilocybin-
fuelled spiritual searching with a nascent
political radicalism. On a wondrously bi-
zarre song called “Journey”, he raps about
doing magic mushrooms in the Olympic
mountains and beatboxing to the sound of
chirping birds, absorbing “their wisdom”;
toward the track’s end, he recounts a more
pointed fantasy in which “I metamorpho-
sise as a Native American, hijack the SantaMaria and assassinate Columbus.” When
I mention this song, Macklemore’s face
turns red, and he reminds me that it was
made a long time ago. But he doesn’t dis-
avow the track either. “I was a high school
kid, fi red up on reading Howard Zinn for
the fi rst time,” he says.
That radicalism extended to an aggres-
sively atheist Macklemore calling religion
a bigger killer than “suicide, AIDS and
cancer combined”, and, on another song,
speculating that George W. Bush was be-
hind the 9/11 attacks. By the 2012 release
of The Heist, however, those rough edges
were softened: Radicalism gave way to in-
spirationalism, and the infl uence of How-
ard Zinn gave way, in the album-opening
“Ten Thousand Hours”, to that of Malcolm
Gladwell. Macklemore was and remains a
proud independent artist who built a local
following, slowly but surely, into a nation-
al one; when he linked up with Lewis his
sound grew distinctly bigger and more
melodic, and for The Heist they signed
a distribution deal with an arm of War-
ner Music, allowing them to borrow some
major-label muscle while remaining indie
otherwise.
On Unruly Mess, Macklemore’s con-
frontational side returns, and no song is
more confrontational than “White Priv-
ilege II” – a sequel to a 2005 rumination
on the same theme. The spark for the song
came in late 2014, when Macklemore, ap-
palled by the non-indictment of Darren
Wilson in the death of Michael Brown,
was photographed participating in a Black
Lives Matter protest in Seattle. A hip-
hop elder statesman (whose name Mack-
lemore wants off the record) saw these
pictures, sent Macklemore a direct mes-
sage on Twitter, then gave him a call. “He
was very complimentary about our music,
then he led into, ‘You have a platform, but
silenceisanaction,andrightnow,you’re
being silent. You have an insight into these
issues that you need to be speaking about,
and, as a white rapper, it’s important that
youengageyouraudience’”–meaning
white people.
Thesongwentthroughanextensivepro-
cessofrevision:Macklemoreloopedina
number of activists, musicians, intellec-
tualsandacademics,andrewroteitbased
ontheirfeedback.“Asawhitepersonstep-
ping into any sort of anti-systemic-racism
type of work, you need to consistently ask
yourself, ‘What is my intention?’ Check
yourself, check yourself, check yourself,”
hesays.“There’snoperfectversionofthis
song,” Lewis says.
Macklemore’s conscience has a history
of landing him, counterintuitively, in trou-
ble. In 2014, afterThe Heist’s Grammy
win, he caught flak for sending a private
message of apology to Kendrick Lamar,
then posting a screenshot to Instagram,
whichmanypeoplethoughtwasaself-80 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com May, 2016
“ ‘White
Privilege II’
might a ect
my sales or
touring, but
that just
doesn’t matter
if I’m not
speaking up.”
Macklemore’s
Guilt Trip