For anyone who enjoys Macklemore, I have some bad news for you. If you take a gander at this link here, you'll see a rather bemusing story. The song "Wings", one of Macklemore's bigger songs, being used in an NBA All-Star ad. Now, on the surface this might not seem so bad, but when you dig a little you find some disturbing stuff.
First of all, the song "Wings" in its entirety has a very distinct anti-consumerist bent. It focuses on his personal story with basketball shoes, but the overarching point of the song is that getting sold on this idea of consumer culture and what you own having any impact on your worth as a human being is bad. And while the NBA All-Star weekend might not seem to be directly in conflict with this message, it is certainly indirectly in conflict with it. A huge part of the NBA's success has been licencing and some of the biggest companies they licence to are shoe companies. Companies like Nike, which gets directly bashed in the song.
Beginning to see the problem?
What makes it even worse is that the song was deliberately censored to remove any anti-consumerist references. Lyrics that are more in line with the NBA's wallet get put in places where more critical lyrics were. Some lines, like "Nike Air Flight, but bad was so dope / And then my friend Carlos’ brother got murdered for his fours, whoa" or "My movement told me be a consumer and I consumed it / They told me to just do it, I listened to what that swoosh said" just get completely cut. For that matter, practically the entire second verse gets cut, the verse that for me is the most emotional in the whole song. The ad blatantly destroys the entire point and the entire message of the song, just to sell some more shoes.
Now Macklemore has addressed this controversy. If you follow this link, you'll see his response. It's good that he responded, but I'm not sold. He has two main counterarguments: "I didn't know they were going to censor it" and "It will get more people to listen to the full song". Both of these are weak arguments, and at one point he even provides the counterargument to the first one in that article. "In any licensing deal they are going to edit your music. A 4 minute song does not fit into a 30 second movie trailer. Lyrics have to get cut in order for the trailer/ad to make sense with what the company is promoting. And a song about consumerism doesn’t fit into an NBA All Star Game intro without some tailoring," he says at one point, which completely invalidates his first argument. If it's so obvious they were going to rip the soul out of this song, he can't claim ignorance that it was going to happen. That really doesn't work. As for his second argument, I have several issues. For starters, it's based on an assumption. The assumption that the ad will get significantly more people to listen to the full song. Now, this is probably true, but there's a very good chance that it's not. The song is already pretty huge, to the point where the kind of people that haven't heard it are usually the kind of people who don't like that type of music and thus are not going to go listen to the full song. On top of that, someone's first experience with the song affects the rest of their listens. When someone's first experience with the song is the NBA cut, it spoils the preceding listens, always bringing the person back to that ad rather than to the message he's trying to get across. My big issue with that argument though is that Macklemore at this point is big enough in sales and influence to find a much better way to boost his listens. I understand that Macklemore loves the NBA, but there has to be a better way to express that love than destroying your creation like this.
I still respect him, mostly for the song Same Love, but I find listening to this song in particular to leave a bad taste in my mouth.
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