After the Grammy Awards debacle, Macklemore laid low for a while. He resurfaced in August 2015 with “Downtown,” which would be the lead single from This Unruly Mess I’ve Made, the duo’s follow-up to The Heist. I remember watching the video in my office, scratching my head at many of the references that pervaded it.
A few aspects of the video jumped out at me:
The “throwback” vibe: there was definitely a 1970s/early 1980s feel to it—the fashions, the nods to blaxploitation films and Michael Jackson videos, and Eric Nally’s Freddy Mercury vibe.
The fact that downtown was, well, not very bustling—why downtown Spokane and not downtown Seattle? I suspect there were very pragmatic reasons for this choice. The Ken Griffey cameo and the nod to the Pike Place fish toss certainly point to Seattle though…
The obvious efforts to connect with old-school hip-hop: including break dancing and graffiti and—of course—the inclusion of Melle Mel, Grandmaster Caz, and Kool Moe Dee.
Justin Williams’ book Rhymin’ and Stealin’ offers useful strategies for thinking about borrowing in rap music (this is an adaptation of a table included on p. 30 of his book):
Image: breakdancing, graffiti, turntables, live battles, fashion, urban space
Sampling and borrowing: using “classic” breakbeats, scratching, and other vinyl sounds
Peer references: referencing rappers, historically important DJs, breakdancing crews
Verbal quotation: allosonic and autosonic* quotations from hip hop films and recordings
Stylistic allusion: imitating earlier styles of rap music, flow, or a particular artists without direct quotation; using older technological equipment to evoke a particular sound
Nostalgia: often based on art vs. commerce; “back in the day” as pure, peaceful, fun, more creative, uncorrupted.
*An allosonic quotation incorporates previous material by re-recording it or performing it live, like in jazz performance of a standard. An autosonic reference quotes previous material by means of digital or analog sampling.
It’s almost as though Macklemore read Williams’ book in preparation for the song/video. Around the 0:44 mark, Caz, Melle Mel, and Kool Moe Dee ride through a graffiti-adorned alley, passing Macklemore who’s tagging a wall. Seattle’s Massive Monkees breakdance crew figures prominently throughout the video. There are definitely battle scenes (around the 2:40 mark), the fashion is reminiscent of the 1970s, and the action definitely takes place in an urban space—it’s a very different urban space than, say, “The Message” (which I recognize came out in 1981 and may seem to be an unfair comparison, but, if Macklemore is looking back, then the comparison to Grandmaster Flash’s video—well, Melle Mel’s and Duke Bootee’s—is apt). More on this in a minute.
There’s not really any direct sampling or (musical) borrowing that I can detect. I would say the beat also evokes “The Message,” at least through the first half of the song or so. The cowbell is one of the TR-808’s signature sounds (but this doesn’t sound like an 808 cowbell to me), and perhaps that’s what it’s intended to signify. Around 0:44 and again at 2:40, the whole crew either raps in unison or punctuates each other’s lines, which was common in a lot of early rap but is far less common today. And the overall nostalgic vibe of the video is hard to ignore: it looks back to a simpler time—perhaps before the Grammy Awards?—when things were peaceful and fun.
Macklemore’s borrowing seeks to establish his credibility not only as a rap artist, but one who has a deep knowledge of rap’s history and its broader connection to hip-hop culture. This was an important thing for him to do in light of the events that followed the Grammys.
I’ve saved discussion of two elements of this video for the end of the post, to heighten drama as I work toward the big reveal in two more posts or so. First, the setting: downtown Spokane is not downtown Seattle, or the Central District (Seattle’s historically black neighborhood, featured in quite a few songs from the area—this is one of my favorites). And even those areas don’t compare to corresponding areas in Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, New York, and Philadelphia. The downtown here is a safe downtown—one that is palatable to Macklemore’s largely white following. To his credit, Macklemore isn’t trying to claim he’s “from the ‘hood” in the way that many (white) rappers have done before him: the reality of his early life probably looks a lot like this video.
Second, the mopeds. Macklemore told MTV about the origins of the song:
“Ryan [Lewis] made a beat on the road called ‘Moping Around,’ I got the beat, I thought it said ‘moped.’
“Coincidentally, we had both purchased mopeds for being on the road so we could get around, leave the venues we were performing at, and I wrote a song about mopeds, which now, a year and a half later is out in the world.”
The mopeds lend a kind of hipster irony to the video which has a similar effect to the Spokane setting: it renders the “dangers” of hip-hop—graffiti, breakdancing, etc.—less frightening. In short, Macklemore worked really hard to establish his hip-hop bonafides in this video without going too far down the path, a move that could’ve alienated the white audiences he depends on. This is borne out not just in the images, but the music as well: producer Ryan Lewis recalls:
“What took forever was how do we sew this together in an intentional way and in a fluid way and not have the rock side invade on what the verses are supposed to be, and the hip-hop side invade on what the rock chorus is supposed to be.”
The song and its accompanying video thus walk a fine line between social constructions of whiteness (Macklemore, downtown Spokane, mopeds, and stadium rock) and social constructions of blackness (rap music and hip-hop culture). Such tightrope walking has always been difficult for white hip-hop artists, and in Macklemore’s case is made more difficult by the rise of Kendrick Lamar, who was now being heralded as the embodiment of a new kind of blackness that emerged in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.