Ten Godforsaken Years of “Thrift Shop"
On the last Seattle-based music star and his cursed contribution to American culture.
They say music is subjective, right? They all say that, we all agree with it, nothing new. So it’s extremely possible that the reason 2013 was such a terrible time for music in America was because I had a summer job in college where I had to drive around campus with football players and cheerleaders and listen to the radio prod at my insecurities, somehow unable to enjoy myself in the company of these extremely well-liked individuals with no cares belting Nate Ruess’ stupid verse on Pink’s “Just Give Me A Reason.” So maybe that’s it, maybe it’s all me and you can stop reading because we figured it out, case closed.
(But I mean you and I can agree that verse is stupid, right? Remember when the pre-chorus starts and Ruess is competently hitting every note along with the piano line and then he says “UH OH” like he suddenly evacuated and isn’t that shy about sharing it? I worked at a Home Depot in 2014 and that song would seep out of the PA while I was sorting nuts and bolts, and every time that part of the song comes I would laugh and then die a little inside.)
A lot of commercially successful music withers in a retrospective light, and that’s why it’s good to be skeptical of the charts. You can argue that popular music is transcendent because it captures exactly what’s cool in its time, and I would argue that’s true to the extent that its actually continually catching up with what was happening between three and five years ago. Otherwise its music platformed by wide swathes of listeners who either a.) don’t care or b.) care but in their own passive, shortsighted capacity. Yes, this is elitist, and yes, I’ll own it. When you’re dealing with the average taste of an entire populace, popular music is guaranteed to reflect that median, excepting the rare moments (like, in my recent memory, Steve Lacy’s “Bad Habit” or anything off of Un Verano Sin Ti) when chart entries are sea changes for their ability to stoke a collective imagination.
2013 was, to put it euphemistically, a little different. Perhaps the year could best be defined by Jody Rosen’s description of Florida Georgia Line’s “Cruise,” whose Nelly-featuring remix would be the ninth-best selling song of the year. In her words: aggressive ordinariness. Its typical excerpts of mediocrity, from Imagine Dragons’ headache-inducing breakthrough “Radioactive” to Awolnation’s “Sail” to the aforementioned Pink duet, are exceedingly mediocre. Some of them made for cumulative nadirs of trends past, like The Lumineers’ trite “Ho Hey” and its capitalization on the abhorrent “indie” sound the industry propped up over the young century. Others would be harbingers for some of the most execrable trends in American musical history. The demand for “Cruise” would be replicated in the demand for bro-country, and Bauuer’s obnoxious “Harlem Shake” would represent a new reason for chart-placing novelty hits thanks to the newfound phenomenon of internet virality (its spiritual cousin, Psy’s “Gangnam Style” would have likely charted higher were America better prepared to face the language barrier). Worse still, the year’s biggest hits reminded us, as the charts occasionally do, of the depths of human depravity. Look no further than “Blurred Lines” and the havoc it wreaked, with a message so wrongheaded it contributed to a social movement whose impact still reverberates today. We can mention “Cruise” here too, for obvious reasons.
The song I want to talk about here is the head honcho of the lot, a song inexorably tied to that weird era. This Friday will mark the ten-year anniversary of Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ “Thrift Shop” topping the Billboard Hot 100, signaling its eventual dominance over the year-end charts. If you haven’t listened to it in a while, you might be unsurprised to find that its accompanying music video is up to 1,700,000,000 views on YouTube, having crossed the billion threshold in 2016. You might also be surprised to find that it’s remained as gratingly catchy and infuriatingly charming as it was back then - that’s one reason, after all, that it sold so well.
Let’s start with the positives, almost all of which are related to the music. Everything else removed, I’m okay with “Thrift Shop” as a rap song. It certainly doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but everything fits together in ways that make it stand out from its chartmates. Its skronky hook is an immediate ear-catcher, and time has rendered it almost nostalgic now that you rarely hear this type of hook anymore. Wanz, who’s apparently been a Seattle musician since the 90s, was hired for the vocal stinger, although really anybody with a bass like his could have accomplished the same thing. Macklemore’s performance, particulrly his flow, is great here too in that he manages to avoid the pitfalls other white rappers might fall into. His lyrics aren’t amazing, but he sells the fuck out of them.
Those lyrics, summarily, illustrate the virtues of shopping cheap, with a quick aside in the second verse where they tackle the folly of the fashion world, specifically where it relates to hip-hop culture. During an interview with NPR (naturally), Macklemore explains that aspect of the song, about examining the superficiality of that environment, and it makes sense on paper if you don’t have any context as to the actual hip-hop world operates, which sounds like a lot of NPR listeners. (I can’t explain it any better than Hanif Abdurraqib, who wrote this classic essay that you must read. Stop and read it right now.)
The problem was that Macklemore was trying to insert a message into a song that really would’ve been just fine as a goofy send-up of the same concept. Were “Thrift Shop” just a dumb little ditty about Macklemore’s honest experience of diving into bargain bins as a youth, it probably would have aged better in the current era of shitposts-as-music. It also would have likely stayed on the top of the charts, because every element that caused it to go viral - the cuss on the refrain, the skronk, the wispy notion of edginess - would still be there. A comment on the music video makes a direct link between this song and 2019’s “Old Town Road,” a comparison that aptly highlights how both songs propelled themselves on their bizarreness.
Lil Nas X, even later in his career when his music crossed over into social progress, doesn’t preach. Macklemore makes didactics part of the package; he’s been doing it ever since he started his career. When given the option, he leans toward gravity. Asked to explain the track’s popularity in an interview with MTV, Macklemore responded: “It's a concept. It's obviously against the status quo of what people normally rap about….how much can you save? How fresh can you look by not looking like anybody else?” Then, afterward, he added that it was a catchy song, which is really the reason anything succeeds on “Thrift Shop’s” level.
It’s hard not to blame him for this tactic, not only because it’s in his nature but because it was already working out in his favor. “Thrift Shop” was actually the fourth single from The Heist, and each of those singles (barring mega-hit “Can’t Hold Us,” which also placed on the year-end charts at #5) contained some nugget of conceptual social messaging, much of it directly critical of hip-hop culture. “Same Love” in particular took hip-hop’s ingrained homophobia to task, and it came out (no pun intended) at the ideal time, right when the U.S. was on the cusp of turning in favor of gay rights. (Though it became an agreed-upon beacon of positivity for that agenda, its treacly self-seriousness has aged poorly. It’s an anthem for allies, and you gotta give the allies credit back then for taking our heavy lifting and running with it, but as both a gay man and a music lover I never ever ever ever liked that song.)
Meanwhile, “Wing$,” released in early January 2011, is all the seriousness that Macklemore ought to have excised out of “Thrift Shop.” It boasts a similarly anti-consumer message, but contextualizes that anti-consumerism in streetwear and shoes, common status symbols of any urban-rooted childhood. To me its pointless to debate the authenticity of the narrative; if Macklemore didn’t actually borrow from his own childhood experiences, I’m sure he knew enough people with those experiences to forge a story with creative license. I’m more intrigued by Macklemore, as a white rapper, feeling the license to funnel his criticisms of capitalism - or at least the idea of America as a nation primarily governed by the dictums of capitalism - through the lens of hip-hop culture. The problem is that, at the time, it wasn’t a problem. It is now. Perhaps that’s presentism, but we’ve seen enough instances of “white savior” mentality for songs like this one to leave a bad aftertaste. Besides, you could argue that “Wing$” doesn’t go far enough. Throughout, Macklemore never really breaks down why kids are drawn to the swoop or the jersey for clout other than pointing to the obviousness of America as a consumerist society, which is too general for the context it’s presented in. Importantly, he closes his narrative with a change of mind but without a presented solution.
This is where his positing “Thrift Shop” as a conceptual song goes awry, because in extolling the virtues of “popping tags” at the local Goodwill, Macklemore was providing an alternative to “$50 for a T-shirt” whose end goals were not necessarily an alternative at all. The end result followed the same rules: buy some shit that makes you stand out socially, and do it at places that don’t cost as much as at a Nike store. In a sense, Macklemore’s supposedly radical stance on rejecting conformity in your attire is actually just another iteration of the individualization that’s been the cornerstone of the American ideal since, roughly, the Declaration of Independence. Even the specificity of the thrift store isn’t novel; bohemians have been thrifting since forever ago out of necessity, and secondhand goods have long been code of cool in the artist world. To display yourself as a person of few means signaled to others that you lived your live through your passions, that you didn’t fit easily into a box, that you weren’t ashamed of it.
When the song finally dominated the charts in early 2013, it blasted that message to every family in America, of all different socioeconomic circumstances. Gradually the thrift shop no longer became the wheelhouse of the needy or the poverty-stricken; amid the song’s popularity, middle- and upper-middle class youths were flocking to thrift shops to try on the idea of being poor, as a fashion statement. This, of course, is the classic pattern of gentrification, a process that’s not only inextricably tied to the arts but also to whiteness, or rather the higher income levels that tend to come with whiteness. Its flip of the consumer script may have resonated with a burgeoning generation of teens and young adults financially reeling from 2008’s recession, but it also dovetailed neatly with the rise of neo-hipsterdom and its share of wealthy practitioners. On top of all of this, popularity tends to erase any semblance of cool, so whatever cultural shorthand used to exist in the necessity of thrifting were eradicated entirely by its normalization. This makes “Thrift Shop,” essentially gentrification set to wax. The boutique shops and upscale consignment stores (“grift shops,” in the words of my brother) that flooded metropolitan areas over the next ten years feel somewhat correlated.
I can’t imagine, given my impression of Macklemore in the decade-plus he’s been a public figure, that that was his intention. Then again, it’s quite the coincidence that a similar thing happened to another Seattle-based megastar decades beforehand. Kurt Cobain lived his adult life counterpoint to the “aggressive ordinariness” of his redneck origins, and yet his music, because of his band’s presence on the top of the charts, became mainstream. To secretly harbor visions of world domination and then recoil from the manifestion of that dream - that is the classic PNW struggle, huh?
See, here’s what gets me. Macklemore is unabashedly from Seattle, and he lets you know constantly of his origins because it’s engrained in the rapper playbook; you represent. In the music video for “Thrift Shop” alone you see him filming at The Unicorn and the NAAM and what used to be the Value Village in Capitol Hill. It’s not there anymore because it was forced to close down as rent prices in the area skyrocketed. I’m not saying “Thrift Shop” is related to its closure, but I am saying that the irony alone might be why so many of us who aim to represent Seattle artistically have been attempting to elide over Macklemore’s ties to the city ever since.
I have a hunch, however, that it also has something to do with the hard truth about Seattle: we’re a surface-level progressive haven for a mostly-white population whose whiteness constantly gets in the way of its intentions. In a sense, we’re probably projecting our own insecurities about this very issue onto him, which is funny considering he’s spent the rest of his career after “Thrift Shop’s” success on rectifying its transgressions - and losing an overwhelming chuck of his national audience in the process. In fact, his philanthropy and dedication to raising awareness of multiple social issues from opioid addiction to LGBTQ+ rights to, most visibly, racial equity makes the Seattle artistic community’s dismissal of him even more ironic.
It’s not as though Macklemore needed our help in shedding his fame. I don’t want to get too deep into his notorious Best Rap Album win at the 2013 Grammys, other than what the win made his work look like in comparison to Kendrick Lamar’s. But the very public apology he gave upon winning the award prognosticated the dive his career would take afterward. It was, after all, a self-serving act. He may have thought it was the right thing to do, but his fans wanted him to own it and his detractors didn’t need to hear it. Everything he’s done since, from the portentousness of 2015’s This Unruly Mess I’ve Made to his softshoed solo work, carries the weight of that mistake. Perhaps he grew to despise that legacy, which perhaps makes him a more scrupulous (and less savvy) person than, say, Post Malone or Jack Harlow or Machine Gun Kelly or whichever white rappers figured out that the best way to keep your career healthy is to ignore the ancient elephant in the room.
Nowadays, hip-hop is still the dominant genre in America, if genre really matters anymore. Artists use the form more as a vessel for whatever moods or vibes they aim to convey. Macklemore’s hanging in there, with his wife and three children and sports jerseys. He’s actually about to put out a new record, if you haven’t already heard about it. If this is the first you’re hearing about it, I don’t blame you. To his credit, he’s still attempting to use his powers for good, donating money to recovery programs and contributing undisclosed funds to one of the greater Seattle area’s most-hyped bands. I’m sitting in a coffee shop writing this on a 2014 MacBook Air wearing a red plaid button-down shirt with he sleeves rolled up that I got for $10 at Lifelong last year. I don’t know why I felt the need to mention that. I just want you to think I’m cool, I guess.