There are a lot of things wrong with Macklemore, but at least it seems like he’s trying to do the right thing. The good things this article will say about him ends there.

Macklemore isn’t blind to societal issues, but he and his confoundingly obsessed followers are completely unaware of how pathetic his entitled attempts to critique them are.

The best place to start is “Thrift Shop,” the most overplayed example of his many middling attempts to act as savior and prophet for the misled American consumer.

At pure face value, the song is simply about how nerdy and awesome thrift store shopping is and how stupid expensive clothing is, and many of my peers and friends (I do have some; it’s weird) have understandably stopped thinking about it there. 

Unfortunately, popular music like his has cultural impact, and it’s important to realize how privileged and ignorant the song really is.

Macklemore’s string of misinformed lectures turned cloying pop hits doesn’t end there. At first, his song “Wing$” took a firm stance against consumerism, specifically with shoe obsession. 

But then he had a chance to sell shoes, and now the fame built on annoying and incorrect moralizing has given way to blatant hypocrisy.

Then he took to SNL wearing the very antithesis of the clothing he ridiculed in both of his anti-consumerist hits.

I really wish that was it, but now we get to the critically ignorant things about Macklemore. 

His unbelievably infuriating self-appointed role as the “conscious” voice for gay rights is the worst thing about America’s most overrated musician.

“Same Love,” according to partner-in-annoying Ryan Lewis, was first written from the perspective of a gay 13-year-old, but then Lewis realized that “This is good, but this isn’t your story…and you have a story.”

Yes, Macklemore, a confessed ex-homophobe is exactly who should speak for a gay 13-year-old, and not, you know, a gay 13-year-old, but it’s great that your friends have realized that the story of an entitled white man is the more important one.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that tolerance is continuing to take hold in the hip-hop community, but Macklemore is completely wrong when he ignores the fact that his voice for gay rights was nowhere near the first to be heard and accepted by the mainstream and even further away from being a new idea in hip-hop.

Quite simply, Macklemore forgets people in the real world actually have to deal with the problems he complains about and are actually trying to express themselves through the very same medium he is.

His presumption that he can speak for others while not following through on his own hijacked and reappropriated messages lead me to believe that he simply loves the idea of being “the good guy” and doesn’t actually think about what he’s doing. In other words, wrong.

His genuine conviction that he’s acting as the savior for a wayward genre of music leads me to believe that his white privilege is as bad as I want to believe it is at my most angry.

In either case, please don’t tell me I dislike him just because I’m angry “Thrift Shop” made thift-stores passe.