Like a good single, a terrible one reveals itself with airplay and forbearance. I don’t want to hate songs; to do so would shake ever-sensitive follicles, and styling gel is expensive. I promise my readers that my list will when possible eschew obvious selections. Songs beloved by colleagues and songs to which I’m supposed to genuflect will get my full hurricane-force winds, but it doesn’t mean that I won’t take shots at a jukebox hero overplayed when I was at a college bar drinking a cranberry vodka in a plastic thimble-sized cup.
Macklemore & Ryan Lewis featuring Mary Lambert’s “Same Love”
PEAK CHART POSITION: #11 in July 2013
In January 2013, Barack Hussein Obama took the Oath of Office, three months after the American public re-elected him by a comfortable margin. His inaugural address‘smost memorable invocation was to remember how far human liberty has come since Seneca Falls, Selma, and Stonewall. Even I gasped.
For a few months in 2013, as liberals and a handful of Republicans hoped a third-rate response to the Newtown shootings the previous winter would survive in the Senate, there was a faint sense that the country had moved toward banishing the most risible elements of homophobia from public policy. It was the fate of Macklemore to release “Same Love” during the same 2013 quarter when Brad Paisley, in an inchoate spasm of Obama-fueled good intentions, persuaded LL Cool J to help him cut “Accidental Racist.” A lumpen, serious, and magnificently imbecilic balm to race relations dependent on the fact that Paisley was white and LL black, “Accidental Racist” offered this couplet: “If you don’t judge my gold chains/I’ll forget the iron chains.” This from LL, a nostrum that, adjusted for fashion changes, Woodrow Wilson and other symbols of racist high-mindedness would have welcomed from Booker T. Washington. As a person of color myself, I might’ve accepted in its place Joe Piscopo and Eddie Murphy’s parody of “Ebony and Ivory” as truth.
Anthems arouse my suspicions – the coercion of the parade march and the football game chanting, blah blah; I know my Adorno. “Same Love” offends me because ideologically it and I should be in sync. But we’re not. First, using gay politics to affirm Macklemore’s affection for the girl “who keeps [him] warm” is astounding. Next, heterosexual and homosexual love are not the same. You can argue, as many fine statesmen have since Bowers vs. Hardwick, that gays deserve equality before the law; certainly you can argue we deserve respect and forbearance. A complex series of dynamics, shaped by a congeries of biology and environment, distinguishes queerness. Finally, addressing the homophobia in hip-hop, casual or pathological, with terrible scansion and a flow like a sink clogged with pizza doesn’t work.
Anchored by Mary Lambert’s vocal and piano on a song she would later call “She Keeps Me Warm” released after Macklemore’s triumph, “Same Love” is cornball realism, with a note of special pleading that makes me gag – a pleading that reifies the beauty of the straight relationship. Macklemore’s just-a-dude timbre might have centered a better song. “When I was in the third grade, I thought that I was gay/‘Cause I could draw, my uncle was and I kept my room straight,” he raps, tripping over the construction of “uncle was and I” and the moral agony of comparing the travails of a straight boy who can draw Hangman in his neat room with the agony of a gay boy called a fag because he was effeminate, or, to remember an incident at my private elementary school, a young lesbian not allowed to play dodgeball because real girls didn’t play sports. Striking the pose of the guy sittin’ around thinkin’ about things mitigates Macklemore’s guilt and, as rhetorical strategy, coaxes the audience into congratulating him for bravery; the true Christian act, Hannah Arendt writes, is invisible, right?
Return to that piano and the coffee shop gospel overtones. The gentility of “Same Love” is like swallowing a roach. If Macklemore had more aggression, he could’ve made something fraught out of the track — a sense of community between the straight man and the gay brothers. “Hip-hop hates me” if I were gay, he mentions, which, you know, fine. Then write a furious response. “Same Love” is the musical equivalent of the liberal gasbag whom the Woody Allen character in Manhattan blinks at when he, the gasbag, praises the intellectual who wrote a devastating satirical piece in “the Times” protesting a Nazi rally in New Jersey. Listening to “Same Love,” I get the impression that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis wrote the song for people who don’t give a shit about hip-hop and possibly gay rights except for posturing about them.
Pathos and incompetence make for grisly fare.
Humanizing The Vacuum 
I’d always assumed that Mary Lambert’s ‘she keeps me warm’ part was from a female perspective, and hence queer, as opposed to affirming Macklemore’s heterosexuality. Perhaps he’s why I like it better.
*perhaps that’s
That’s a good point — I hadn’t considered it. Listening to “She Keeps Me Warm” by itself underlines that point.