too dubstep for your parents

so look, there’s this little second-hand shop down the road from where i live — used to live — whatever. it’s lit like the inside of the sort of photograph you might find tucked into a forgotten shoebox in a forgotten attic in a forgotten town west of where you intended to end up; all yellowed and browned, you know? like the whole shop’s the aftermath of a place, a ghost too wheezing tired to fix itself up, so even the light seems slower and older than it’s meant to except for in this one corner, just opposite the window over the door where the only plate of clean glass sits. i don’t know how that plate got there, maybe the owner’s got a kid or something, but the beam of light that comes through there is the sole spot of color in the whole place — well, except for the yellow and brown — and the items for sale, i guess — oh, you know what i mean. 

anyway, i bought this scarf for you. 

the thing is, i’m not sure that you’ll wear it — i’m sure you won’t wear it — it’s not really your size or your color — well, colors — and it’s uglier than the last thing i said to you, is the truth, the real truth. it looks like it belongs in that secondhand shop and not wrapped around the really, if you think about it, the shockingly fragile combination of skin and tendons that someone — god, whomever — saw fit to sit your head upon. that’s the kind of thing you would say and i think about it — fragility, i mean — sometimes when i can’t sleep and the brown and yellow gets to me and i hunch my shoulders in a forgotten attic, town, photograph buried too young inside a shoebox nobody ever opens. i just sit at the bus stop with the wind howling yesterday’s slow dirges and the wool tassels of your scarf rough underneath the pads of my fingers while i keep rolling them and rolling them, trying to work the itch out. i’m not going to work it out — the itch, that is — you and me, it’s hard to know, that’s what i’m saying. not saying. forget it, anyway.

Same Love was released as a single on July 18, 2012, almost a year ago; it was written in response to Washington Referendum 74, which, if passed, would approve the bill legalizing same-sex marriage in Macklemore’s home state Washington. All of the proceeds from the single (we’re talking disc sales, digital downloads, radio airplay) went to funding an organization called Music4Marriage, which was a Washington-based organization raising awareness about Referendum 74 in support of same-sex marriage. The referendum was passed by voters on November 6, 2012, and same-sex marriage is now legal in the state of Washington.

At this time, most of you still didn’t know Macklemore even EXISTED, because his smash radio hit Thrift Shop didn’t even enter the greater public consciousness until it started burning up the charts in late December.

Same Love fought its fight well before any of you even heard it, so whether or not you think it’s annoying or condescending or trivializing, it remains that it accomplished the goal it was intended for. But now that his ubiquity is at peak levels, I’m seeing numbering complaints about how Macklemore, who, at the time he wrote and recorded the song, was just a locally-known Seattle-based hip-hop artist, is latching onto a movement he doesn’t belong in, is hurting the LGBT community, is just looking for attention.

This is the guy who put his two uncles on the cover of the Same Love single. This is the guy who asked fellow Seattle musician and actual member of the queer community Mary Lambert if she would sing the chorus on his song. This is the guy who released a seven-minute music video for it that he doesn’t even appear in, until the last 30 seconds.

And now that he’s made a name for himself, even though this fight has yet to be won in places outside the state of Washington, he’s attention-seeking or disingenuous or condescending for using his newfound platform to spread that message even further?