Despite Diss editor Jacob Greenberg’s objections (“white liberal dude starts rapping about liberal issues and everyone’s in fucking love”), I am was a pretty big fan of the rapper Macklemore. His stuff focuses on subjects I am interested in, has a social and moral consciousness, and is damn catchy. In fact, after seeing a shitty song by a Canadian rapper about the Grizzlies bounce around basketball blogs, I cited Macklemore as an example of how “good song” and “sports song” don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
Macklemore officially blew up when his album The Heist dropped in October and immediately shot up the Billboard Chart. Especially gratifying for me was the abundance of honest and heart-wrenching songs about addiction, same sex marriage, hard work and consumerism. Even better, one of those songs was about basketball.
Wing$ (look at that dollar sign!) begins as an ode to Nike kicks, with Macklemore detailing how good they made a young him feel, before quickly turning dark: “And then my friend Carlos’ brother got murdered for his Fours”. Macklemore goes on to chronicle the lust of consumerism that Nike brought out in him (I wanted to be cool, and I wanted to fit in / I wanted what he had, America, it begins) and its destructive effect on society.
I may not know murder, but I do understand quite personally the appeal of Nike kicks, and how they can make a relatively well-adjusted 11 year old (me) ashamed of who he is, how they can make you feel like academic achievements, athletic success and having close friends and family are less reflective of your personality than the shoes on your feet. Luckily, I got over the phase relatively quickly, but man. All for a goddamn pair of shoes. In Wing$, Macklemore does a wonderful job of capturing exactly how I felt.
And so I was incredibly disappointed, moreso than I usually am about society’s perpetual disappointments, to see the NBA’s latest All-Star Game promo: a remix of Wing$ featuring gobs of Nike glorification and an absence of any message deeper than “SHOES MAKE ME FEEL COOL LIKE MICHAEL JORDAN”. I get that the NBA paid Macklemore some money—and probably a lot of it—for the promo, and that the dude makes a living for himself and his family by rapping. I guess I just thought he would wait a little while before selling out, and would do it less blatantly.
As far as the NBA is concerned, great job co-opting a song critical of one your bigger, if not biggest, corporate partners. Couldn’t the NBA have just let us have this one, though? It is not like this was the only song they could have chosen to use.
For more on the colossally poor decision Macklemore made in abandoning any claim to street cred that once had, check out Andrew Unterberger’s wonderful piece.
