Sunday, January 5, 2014

"Hey Macklemore! Can We Go Thrift Shopping?"


     Kweku Djan may have beat me to doing a blog on Macklemore & Ryan Lewis’ song “Wing$,” he still left me with a lot of material.
     I’ll break it up into two blogs because these two songs are completely different, so for right now… LET’S GO THRIFT SHOPPING!!!
     The first video is the released music video for the song. Fair warning: There's a lot of profanity in this song. Just letting you know. As you watch, you can really see the whole idea behind the song. In case you can’t hear the lyrics, I’ve provided the second video, which includes the song and lyrics (but no music video):


         What Macklemore is trying to tell us through this song is that we don’t have to have flashy clothes and a ton of money to be cool. Usually, especially in the media, beauty is largely associated with dress. As jokingly stated by Macklemore,
“I'm like, ‘Yo - that's fifty dollars for a T-shirt.’
Limited edition, let's do some simple addition…
I call that getting tricked by a business

     As he says, businesses trick us into thinking that their products are what make you cool. They feed off of our desires to fit in and feel cool by providing a bridge between the too.
     Macklemore uses his funny, sarcastic tone just to show how truly ridiculous this concept is. He also shows this in the music video by showing us how cool we can be and how much fun we can still have without having to empty wallets.
     Ultimately, I think this song, besides being a a catchy new rap tune, is also an effective symbol for the fight against media-influenced lifestyles.








2 comments:

  1. I've never looked at the song in this aspect before. Now, that you've pointed out that this song is a symbol for the fight against media-influenced lifestyles, I couldn't agree more. At first, I didn't like this song because I thought it was a bunch of nonsense thrown together. I can understand how this song would be appealing to people because of the underlying messages, and because it's catchy.

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  2. This song isn't really my style, but I like the message that it's sending. When I first heard it, I thought it was stupid, but the message is really important. This song became really popular and no one really realized what he was trying to say with his exaggerated style or the sarcasm. I think it was pretty ironic that this is speaking out against the media but became a pretty big deal in the media anyway.

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