"Same Love"

Hiphop artist Macklemore's “Same Love” is about all peoples’ right to live and to love. With a distinctive sermonic tone, Macklemore delivers a compelling discourse on a subject that’s so far been untouched by popular musicians: homosexuality.

Amid a gentle melody that feels  like a peaceful Sunday morning, Macklemore articulates the hypocrisy of our society. Since the Revolutionary War, we have been “a culture founded from oppression.” Yet, he suggests, we allow the oppression of homosexuals to continue. And despite the belief that “God loves all his children,” we judge and reject gay men and women.

However, rather than accusatory, he is solidary. His words don’t draw a divide between the “good” people and the “bad people;” with the line, “America the brave still fears what we don’t know,” Macklemore holds us all accountable for the way things are. 

If I’m not a part of the prejudice, he makes us ask ourselves, am I a part of the path to equality? 

Confronting hiphop, religion, American culture, and our newly found networking habits, Macklemore illustrates the varieties in which we participate in the discrimination of gays. Even with our everyday language--"man that's gay"-- we lower homosexuality to an almost inhuman trait. "Gay" and "faggot" are words "rooted in hate," yet we ignore that fact. Macklemore insists by doing so that we make homosexuality "synonymous with the lesser."

Macklemore, backed by apparent empathy and the revelation that he has a gay loved one, establishes a calm but potent argument. However, the true authenticity comes from poet and musician Mary Lambert’s involvement in the project. With a chorus revealing simultaneous strength and vulnerability, Lambert confides to the world a powerful admission: “I can’t change/Even if I tried/Even if I wanted to.” Her ringing, honest voice asks the world to accept “gay love” as just “love,” and it asserts self-pride with or without that acceptance.

One of the artist's most powerful assertions, however, is that hate surrounding sexual orientation is the same as hate based on skin color. This assertion hits America hard. We are a country whose history is written in the blood and sweat of blacks, Chinese, Japanese, women, Mexicans and all other kinds of people. Nearly every culture in America has had to fight oppression for their right to be here, yet we collectively continue to make the same mistake of discrimination. Macklemore insists that this fight for "gay rights" is simply a fight for equality, "it's the same fight that led to walk-outs and sit-ins," that has "caused war from religions." So he calls us, the people, to rise up and stop the pattern. He calls us to change ourselves and the way we think by pointing out that we've been able to do this before.