When rapper Macklemore stepped off the stage after his history-making performance at the Grammys on Sunday, he stepped right into a shitstorm over some questionable and mostly dumb tweets he sent back in 2009. Now, people are asking a lot of questions about what his real views are and it’s raised a lot of controversy. Not to worry though! I am here to get to the bottom of all of this.
I drank wine all night and randomly clicked around on his old Twitter messages waiting for my Easy Mac and Cheese to heat up performed extensive investigative research and managed to dig up some of the most important tweets from a rap artist since this happened, and am ready to break them down for you so we can properly analyze this shitstorm one pile of shit at a time.
By now, we’re all familiar with this tweet, the tweet that launched a thousand angry Thought Catalog posts.
One of the more important things to note about this tweet is that he apparently used a SIDEKICK to send it. Sidekicks were AWESOME! You remember Sidekicks, don’t you? And I found out that they apparently still make them! You can get a Sidekick right now. Isn’t that awesome! Helloooo?
OK. That tweet seems gross, stupid and much like the Ace of Base tattoo I almost got in 1995, totally unnecessary. Also, why do people feel the need to clarify when you say you
love New York that you are not gay? What is up with that? Do you really
have friends that are so batshithomophobic that they’re going to be all “OMG duuuuude you love a city; are you gay now?” Get
some better friends. Those people are probably idiots and are going to
do nothing but try and borrow money from you for stupid shit, like
buying Slap Chops in bulk. But as many people pointed out, the rapper’s tweet was most likely a frustrated response to the very homophobic “no homo” bullshit. OK. So there’s one tweet accounted for.
The Washington Post looked into all of this and here’s what they had to say:
Of Macklemore’s 15,510 tweets, fewer than two dozen ever
use the word “gay.” They are almost exclusively about gay marriage. (In
November 2011, Macklemore tweeted to a fellow musician that he
unfollowed him because “you still say ‘gay’ on Twitter … as in ‘that was
gay.'”)….
The obvious takeaway, of course, is that pulling isolated,
context-free snippets out of an artist’s Twitter feed and using that as
an argument to undermine his integrity/entire career is neither fair nor
particularly reliable. But it’s also yet another good reminder that the
things you send out into the Internet ether stay there in perpetuity,
even after you become a wildly popular Grammy-winning musician (… or
presidential candidate, or parent, or whatever else. It’s honestly
difficult to imagine how the Twitter/Facebook generation will survive
scrutiny or opposition research later in life.)
Hmm. But wait—there’s more batshitcrazy tweets!
Oh. Dear. Well, maybe he’s just not a baseball fan. Maybe that baseball game was blocking his view of some pretty flowers on the hill. I don’t know. Pulling stuff out of my ass here on this one. Anyway, people were getting pretty pissed off about this one.
Oh, but no wait actually (speaking of pulling things out of context) this tweet references a charity event called “Dykes vs. Drag Queens” in the rapper’s hometown of Seattle that benefited a local LGBTQ support group.