Macklemore – cheap lyrics for cheap nights out

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/05/macklemore-cheap-lyrics-for-cheap-nights

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There's a 29-year-old rapper from Seattle called Macklemore who has spent the past two weeks at No 1 in the US Billboard 100, ahead of new releases from Bruno Mars, Taylor Swift and Britney Spears. He's already been No 1 in Canada, Denmark, Australia and New Zealand and is probably going to be No 1 in the UK on Sunday too. More astonishing than this, Macklemore is an unsigned artist, only the second in history to have a US No 1.

The song that has led him to international success is called Thrift Shop. It's about second-hand shopping. Sort of. Your protagonist threatens to "take you grandpa's style" by buying cheap clothes as well as a number of other items, including a broken keyboard, some supermarket-brand trainers and a "skeet blanket" to masturbate into. Basically, just another day at a Cancer Research shop.

The first thing you think when you listen to it is ... how? How has this song, which barely sounds like a song, more like a rejected Saturday Night Live sketch or a Weird Al album track, become a global hit?

What's surprising about it is not that it's bad especially, but that it's incompetent. You might not like LMFAO but they're at least good at what they do. Macklemore is both unlikable and terrible. The references in it – R Kelly sheets smelling of urine, the popularity of plaid button-up shirts – are over 10 years old, the rhyming patterns often give up halfway through, and you'd get a more astute analysis of modern fashion if you took Mrs Brown to an Urban Outfitters.

So what's its secret? Conventional wisdom is that this is a recession anthem, piercing through the corporate control that has made us believe branded clothing is worth more than it is. After years of hearing about how much bling and money rappers have, the general public want to hear Macklemore say, "Fifty dollars for a T–shirt – that's just some ignorant bitch shit," with his trademark charm and subtlety.

But I believe the Mack is tapping into another global trend, not recession and frugality, but banter. Perhaps not banter exactly, but the banter brigade. You know the ones, who wear hooded animal onesies on nights out to chain nightclubs like Oceana and Tiger Tiger, where they drink alcohol out of funnels and test tubes. The ones who fill the town centres of Britain every night. Fill them with vomit and Vodka Kick.

The UK has slowly been adopting and re-appropriating American frat-house culture for over a decade. The slow creep of Abercrombie, public pranks and a disregard for contemporary culture first took hold in Britain's universities, where it was re-appropriated by the Brits to include "pub golf", a toffy-take on the traditional pub crawl, lots of dressing up (strippers and vicars, neon-paint and dressing in animal outfits) and a kind of pick-and-mix attitude to music, where TV themes, football chants and 90s pop all blend in 30-second bursts in nightclubs that smell of chlorine and regret.

The dominant "student culture" isn't, as is portrayed in David Nicholls novels, one of leftwing politics and Smiths records, but dressing up, pre-drinking and getting aboard the banter bus. It's a culture relatively disinterested in high-fashion, changing pop trends, cutting-edge technology or protest. It's interested in drawing a penis on your face, drinking a lot, dancing to PJ and Duncan and going home with someone.

Getting blind drunk has been part of student culture for centuries and cheesy nightclubs have been around since at least the 80s. But they have grown from a niche minority to become the presiding mode of nightlife in Britain. Never has there been such a mass disinterest in popular culture among those it is aimed at, and never have they been so keen on wearing pyjamas outdoors. This kind of nightlife is a hundred times more popular than grime raves, burlesque shows or anything that has had infinitely more press coverage, but is ignored because it has so little to say.

Step forward Macklemore, a man dedicated to entertaining the drunk and disorderly. Another of his songs, And We Danced, begins with a spoken intro explaining that after he was extradited from Britain for streaking at the Royal Wedding he was brought to the USA so he could resurrect the recession-ridden dancefloors of America "with the big long pink ding dong penis". What a lad.

So the focus of Thrift Shop isn't the cheapness of the attire, but the wackiness of the clothes. Macklemore buys "a onesie, with the socks sewn in"? <em>Top bants!</em> A "velour suit and some house slippers"? <em>Lol m8, c u in those @ Vodka Revs!!</em> The song's international success suggests this isn't just a British phenomenon but a global trend.

There's only one problem for Macklemore: the banter brigade are a regimented unit when tanked up on a Friday night, but by Monday morning many of them are kind, sensitive humans. Perhaps Macklemore will be another drunken embarrassment, forgotten like a novelty cowboy hat. I can only hope.