Macklemore, the Lone Rapper With Some Sense Right Now

Macklemore. Photo: Mat Hayward/Getty Images

Say what you volition astir Macklemore, but helium volition rage against the machine. In the mediate of the nastiest, and perhaps most unserious, rap beef of the decade, the Seattle MC directed his animus toward Israel’s “apartheid system” against Palestine. Macklemore released the anti-genocide, Palestine-solidarity way “Hind’s Hall” connected May 6, the aforesaid time Israel seized a borderline crossing astatine Rafah, the metropolis wherever 1.3 cardinal displaced Palestinians person crammed for refuge, cutting disconnected a captious assistance route. All proceeds from Macklemore’s way volition spell to a United Nations–run nonprofit supporting Palestinian refugees. “I privation a cease-fire, fuck a effect from Drake (woo),” Macklemore spits. We conjecture Kendrick and Drake going bar-for-bar implicit who’s the worst abuser portion an existent warfare decimates a full state didn’t needfully bash it for the rapper. “What happened to the artist?” Macklemore raps. “What d’you got to say?”

The rubric “Hind’s Hall” refers to the since-raided Columbia University building pupil activists occupied past week, which they renamed successful remembrance of a 6-year-old unfortunate of the war, Hind Rajab. Macklemore criticizes the brutal suppression of protesters successful his bars, questioning the thought that calls for divestment from warfare profiteering and protesting for bid are someway threatening and antisemitic. Calling retired achromatic supremacy and the buttressing of an apartheid system, helium urges activists to proceed their enactment until Palestine is free. “What if you were successful Gaza? What if those were your kids?” Macklemore raps. “If the West was pretendin’ that you didn’t exist? / You’d privation the satellite to basal up and the students yet did.”