Album review: Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made

The success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis’s 2012 album The Heist seems to have blindsided the Seattle hip-hop duo, with the pair mulling endlessly over the downside of fame on their long-awaited follow-up record.

Macklemore has certainly come to know what it feels like to be a public punch bag. He became a target of internet hate with his 2014 Grammy win perceived as a slight against fellow nominee Kendrick Lamar.

That Lamar was black and Macklemore white was not lost on anyone, and the easy-going Macklemore found himself the focus for a debate about racial identity in American hip-hop. For a rhymer who had started out selling jokey mixtapes around the Pacific Northwest it was a curious position to be in.

He addresses the subject on recent single ‘White Privilege II’, asserting his underdog credentials, yet acknowledging that, compared to his African-American peers, he had it easy.

However, his undoubted good intentions are lost on a song that lays on the preachiness with a trowel. Sincerity has never worked especially well in hop-hop and Macklemore’s craw-thumping comes off as a pose, no matter that he is assuredly speaking from the heart.

That’s a problem across the entire LP, which is short on the immediate hooks of the duo’s biggest hit, ‘Thrift Shop’. Macklemore tenderly speaks to his daughter on ‘Growing Up (Sloan’s Song)’ yet the grooves are clunking, Macklemore’s lyrics brimming with Hallmark sentimentally.

And he turns straight-up whiney on single ‘Light Tunnels’, wherein he recalls his Grammys win as a nightmare experience. No doubt it’s tough at the top — but do Macklemore and Lewis have to spend an entire album making the point?

Amid the stodge are some fascinating cameos. This surely is the first record to feature KRS-One, Ed Sheeran and actor Idris Elba (not on the same track alas). But Unruly Mess is ultimately a record that doesn’t know what it wants to be.

Further acclaim, and Macklemore would probably go utterly around the bend. Yet it’s hard to imagine him wanting to return to his days playing pokey clubs either. The album both embraces fame and pushes it away — and the result is a queasy hodgepodge.