An Open Letter to Macklemore: Please Stop Saying You're Sorry

Apologizing is so not hip-hop.

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Complex Original

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Dear Mack:

You seem like a true fan of rap. (No, really.) Here’s a quiz: What’s more hip-hop? A) an undeserving album winning the Grammy for Best Rap Album, or B) apologizing for winning?

So you won the Grammy for Best Rap Album, and you most certainly did not record the best rap album in the past year, or the past 15 months, or the past two life cycles of a geranium or whatever time frame the Recording Academy uses. Big wup. As a rap fan, you know that the Grammys have a checkered past when it comes to judging hip-hop, and that getting indignant about their choice for Best Rap Album is akin to going out for “a” drink with your not-quite-reformed cokehead buddy and coming home two days later all “I just don’t know what got into me!”

So quit apologizing. Not to get too reductive, but that shit is not hip-hop. Enough with the “I robbed you,” and “I wanted you to win.” You’ve been doing this for years. You released your album independently. Of course you wanted to win. Own that shit, man. And definitely enough with the Instagramming your text apologies; that just confirms everyone’s worst biases about the mawkishness of white people.

Enough with the Instagramming your text apologies, it just confirms everyone’s worst biases about the mawkishness of white people.

What exactly is wrong with your album? You wrote a song celebrating gay love, and a bunch of (mostly white) liberal writers found a way to criticize you for it. And you’re the one who’s apologizing? (Seriously, let’s talk white privilege: an artist working in a traditionally homophobic genre makes a song advocating gay marriage, and the thinkpiece bloggerati somehow turns that into a bad thing? Now Chief Keef on the other hand…)

Thankfully, it’s not too late. Remember, Kanye apologized once. How’d that go? Things looked kinda bleak for the god when he sat on Jay Leno’s couch and allowed that blockhead to ask him if he thought his mom would be disappointed in him. ‘Ye had to take a break for a minute, but when he came back, he was apologizing to nobody.

So, take a page from Kanye’s book, and follow this three-step guide to overcoming your bout with apologia:

1. Record a diss track called “Control Top Thrift Shop Panty Hose.” Call yourself the king of Flatbush, the king of Bed-Stuy, the king of Queensbridge—all of ‘em. Go at Kendrick, go at Jay, go at Biggie, definitely go at KRS-One. Call Joe Budden a simp. Go extra grimey in the video (Suggestion: Nore tonguing down that country chick who wore the short skirt with the tassled balls on the Grammys. That would be dope.) When Papoose records a response, put a Grammy statuette in Remy Ma’s commissary and Instagram that.

2. Record a gun control anthem. Call it “Gunz Down” or something similarly obvious, just so the rap bloggers go completely conniptive. Perform it at next year’s Grammys. If there’s one thing the world needs more than same-sex couples being married live on stage in a ceremony officiated by Queen Latifah, it’s the executive board of the NRA being skull-fucked with plaster of paris AR-15s live on stage in a ceremony officiated by the Eazy-E hologram.

3. Quit fucking apologizing.

Jack Erwin is a rap snob. He only listens to that crap at work. 

RELATED: Macklemore, White Privilege, and The Grammy For Best Rap Album
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RELATED: The Grammys' Biggest Hip-Hop Mistakes: Snubs, Errors, and Embarrassments 

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