I’m not 100% sure why we’re looking to mainstream rap for politics or as legitimization, but there’s a reason why Macklemore made this song now. This is a question that I guess half my blog-as-personal revolves around, but this simple: it’s because there’s a movement.
There is no such thing as a protest song in itself, revolutionary art in itself. I don’t even believe in a piece of music being beautiful ‘in itself’, even if Satie Bach and Monk make that confusing sometimes. These things flower, take their strength from, and encourage extant relations.
The truth is that until comparatively recently we did not, in the US, have a movement centered around Palestine like a comparatively large scale student movement that was brave, loud, and absolutely impossible to ignore. That is not me disparaging by any means everything everyone has done since Oct, and not to insult Macklemore either. But that particular image and the extant fact of that solidarity is what makes things possible. It’s to be encouraged.