If you had asked me two weeks ago how I felt about Macklemore, I would have told you that both he and his music enter my brain like white noise without ever really leaving any lasting impression. But we don’t live in the Australia of two weeks ago anymore. Things have changed. This week, we are all Macklemore fans.
There hasn’t been a lot to enjoy about the postal survey. As predicted, it has given a bunch of bigoted deadshits license and confidence to be bigoted deadshits on every platform ranging from print to radio to TV to the fucking sky itself. People who previously were rightly too ashamed to express their homophobia are now crawling out from beneath their rocks to make life as miserable as possible for anyone that isn’t a 0 on the Kinsey Scale. It’s not fun stuff. One of the only things keeping me going is the joy I derive from the spectacular own goals the ‘no’ side keeps on kicking.
Like old mate Cory Bernardi deciding that a school fundraiser for African school children is political correctness gone too far (who the fuck knows with this guy) and that very same fundraiser subsequently raising a whopping $275,000 thanks to the efforts of the effervescently gay and delightful Josh Thomas.
If that’s not enough to put a little warmth into your exhausted queer bones, how about Macklemore pledging to donate the money he makes off ‘Same Love‘ to the ‘yes’ campaign because Tony Abbott is flipping his lid over it somehow being legal to play a song that doesn’t actively demonise homosexuality at the NRL grand final.
Talking to Channel 9 today, Macklemore said he’s not fully across how he’s gonna do it, but he’s sure he bloody will:
I haven’t figured it out yet but I was saying in the car ride over that I want to donate my portion of the proceeds from ‘Same Love‘, that I get off the record over in Australia, to voting ‘yes’. I haven’t quite figured out what that looks like, or how I’m going to do that, but that is something that I’m going to do.
Tony Abbott being in a feud with Macklemore in 2017 is probably not something many of us would have predicted, but here we are. Abbott’s Crabbe-and-Goyle-esque best mate Peter Dutton is similarly incensed at the rapper’s plan to be openly pro-gay in song form, offering up this absolutely bonkers comment: “I am into free speech […] presumably two songs should be played, one for gay marriage and one against gay marriage.” As we all know, free speech means the state gets to dictate what views are expressed by private citizens hired to perform at an event by a private company.
Fingers crossed these dumbasses continue punching themselves in the dick so we can eke at least a little bit of joy out of what is otherwise an awful process.
